Choosing just the right bottle of wine to enjoy with a meal, for a special occasion, or simply to savor is an art form. The right vintage, the right character, and the right flavor are all essential. Once you’ve chosen the perfect bottle, you still need to consider a few additional elements to maximize your wine experience.

The proper stemware, for example, is important. Should the wine be decanted? And what about the temperature? The temperature at which wine is served may seem a trivial thing. But indeed it is not. A wine served too cool or too warm can loose its character and may not be a pleasure to drink. In general, we tend to drink our white wines too cold and our red wines too warm in the U.S.A. So what is the proper serving temperature and how can you ensure it?

Homes in the U.S. are typically kept between 70 and 73 degrees Fahrenheit. This “room temperature” is too warm for serving your reds. 62 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit for reds is ideal and will allow the wine to deliver a better balance between the fruit and acid, and bring out the best it has to offer. White wines should not be over-chilled. A wine that is too cold stifles the molecular movement and will not allow its full aroma and bouquet to appear. The taste too will be less than optimal. 48 to 54 degrees Fahrenheit is ideal for most whites. The result is a delicious and consistent wine with each pour.

Down through the ages many devices have been used to chill white wines. Ice buckets, refrigerators, freezers, ice wraps, even cold streams and lakes have at one time or another taken their turn in attempting to bring wine to its optimum drinking temperature. The wines, however, were either too cold or too warm.

There are several options we recommend for chilling your wines to perfect serving temperature:

• We like the reusable Wine Wrapsody. The Wine Wrapsody is a high-tech product that surfaced just a few months ago from a manufacturer in Dalonega. It’s a “smart” wrap for your wine bottle that maintains a constant ideal temperature. There are two versions, one for reds and one for whites. The chemically programmed gel modules maintain a cooled white wine at 50 degrees Fahrenheit and a red wine at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. The Wine Wrapsody will maintain this temperature for 1-1/2 – 2 hours, great for picnics, dinners, and parties. It is attractively packaged for personal use or as gifts and can be ordered for $19.95 plus shipping by calling 1-888-645-3744.
• A wine refrigerator is a great luxury, but they don’t have to be expensive or especially made for wines. You can easily find a dorm-size refrigerator or small wine fridge for under $100 (Michael found a 47-bottle wine fridge at Home Depot for $129). Setting the temperature on these things may be a bit of a mystery. But actually it’s quite easy to solve. Put a kitchen-safe thermometer in the fridge for one hour, check the reading and adjust accordingly. Keep the thermometer in the fridge and check periodically because the temperature will vary depending on how full the refrigerator is. These cheaper options will not come with dual climate control so it’s best to have one for reds and one for whites. Still a bit of an investment, but worth many years of enjoyable wine.
• If you find yourself in a pinch, here’s a rudimentary (and certainly not exact!) way to solve your temperature problem. A bottle of wine will cool approximately 4 degrees Fahrenheit for every ten minutes in the refrigerator, and will warm at about this same rate when removed from the refrigerator and left at room temperature. If the wine is starting out room temperature (approximately 70 degrees Fahrenheit), put your whites in the refrigerator for 50 minutes, take them out and serve immediately. Put your red in the fridge for 20 minutes, take them out and serve immediately.
• And if you’re REALLY short on time, there is no substitute for the ice bucket—however, the secret is adding enough water to the bucket to actually see it at the surface. A proper ice/water solution up to the neck of a bottle will chill it in less than 20 minutes!