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Regardless of variety, red wine should be stored at fairly cool temperatures to keep it from spoiling. Even alcohol goes bad eventually, although it takes longer to develop off flavors and aromas than, say, fresh fruit. When you consider a traditional wine cellar , this idea makes sense. The temperature underground or in a cool cave is right around 55 degrees, and this temperature is ideal for keeping anything from a California Pinot Noir to a Cabernet Sauvignon from Italy in great shape for drinking at a later date.
Your standard kitchen refrigerator needs to be kept much colder than this, so a separate wine fridge is efficient and keeps your favorite reds for months — maybe even years — at a time. Although the proper temperature for wine storage is a cool 55 degrees, the general rule of thumb for serving reds holds that they taste their best at room temperature.
This is a great place to start, since many people prefer a warm red with meals, especially for food pairings with rich meats like steak or duck. Body is based on how the wine feels in your mouth, whether heavy and thick or light and thin. This feel, in turn, is typically correlated to the alcohol content of the wine.
Generally speaking, different grape varieties fall into different categories of body:. The right temperature for full-bodied reds truly is room temperature — provided you keep your house at 64 to 65 degrees year-round. Many people prefer indoor temperatures between 68 and 75, which would be significantly warmer than the temperature at which you should drink your wine.
The result? Now that you understand the basics of body and serving temperature, you can dive into the nitty-gritty. As you can see, many sommeliers recommend that light-bodied red be chilled just a touch before serving. This is most easily accomplished by placing the bottles on your bar or table 30 minutes before serving; however, you can also harness the convenience of a dual-zone wine fridge that lets you adjust the temperatures to serving standard a few hours before your dinner.
Just right. So how do you take a wine from a degree room temperature or higher and bring it down the ideal "cellar temperature? Juts pop the bottle into the fridge for about 15 minutes. If you're in a hurry, the freezer is an option, but I don't recommend it. It exposes the wine to too much cold, too fast. And the enemy of wine is abrupt temperature change. Fill an ice bucket with ice and water. Then add some salt. This will chill down the wine in about 10 minutes or less.
Just touch-test the bottle to make sure it isn't getting too cold. This is a last resort, but if you drop an ice cube in the wine and pluck it out a minute or two later, you'll drop the temperature and not add much in the way of melted water to dilute the wine. A lot of wine shops have wine chillers that can quickly cool down a bottle of white wine.
But they can chill a red, too. Place it in the refrigerator for 90 minutes. Fuller-bodied, tannic wines like Bordeaux and Napa Cabernet Sauvignon taste better warmer, so keep them to 45 minutes in the fridge. Like Goldilocks, somewhere in between is just right. Thank You! We've received your email address, and soon you will start getting exclusive offers and news from Wine Enthusiast.
Dessert wines like Sauternes fall into the same range. Prosecco , or similarly light-bodied fruity sparklers work better at the bottom end. Advance Planning. This rule applies to most everything in life. Stick reds and whites in the fridge and remove them an hour or two before dinner. The Freezer.
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