Can you chill wine

Sweet, rich wines should be served slightly warmer at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Any warmer and the sweetness of the wine will overshadow the mineral qualities. You can chill white wine in the refrigerator for about two hours or in the freezer for 20 minutes. To make sure your white is perfectly ready for your enjoyment, we love this wine thermometer that doubles as a gorgeous bottle opener. Traditionally delivered and served from an ice bucket, sparkling wines are often served colder than their non-bubbly siblings.

The ideal temperature for sparkling wines is between 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. To get it there, toss a room temperature bottle in your refrigerator for about two and a half hours or in the freezer for about 25 minutes.

Then set the bottle on the table for just a couple minutes before opening. In most cases, your wine glasses are going to be warmer than you want to serve your wine. A dramatic temperature difference can quickly change the temperature - and therefore the experience - of your wine.

Use glasses with stems so the person enjoying the wine can hold the glass without his or her hand warming the cup. That should do the trick! The most common misconception with red wine is that it is ideal to serve it at room temperature, when in fact serving it cool is the best way to enjoy it. To cool red down to its proper temperature, we like to place it in the fridge an hour before serving it.

For quicker results, you can put it in the freezer for just 15 minutes. Fair enough. One of the recommendations floating around the Web is keeping frozen grapes or special wine chilling cubes in your freezer for dropping into a glass of warm wine without dilution.

But practically speaking, it requires more forethought and investment than, say, popping a bottle of wine in the refrigerator at the get-go the cubes takes about hours to chill in the freezer, longer than it takes to chill a bottle. Not to mention the fact that you have to navigate either frozen grapes or clunky metal cubes each time you take a sip.

Has anyone chipped a tooth on a wine-chilling cube? We have not studied this scientifically. The recommendation that both Halpin-Healy and Blonder put forth also happens to be the one that sommeliers use at restaurants: sticking a bottle of wine in ice water. Water is a more efficient thermal conductor than air, at about 25 times the rate. Some people vow that pouring a bottle of wine into a plastic zipper-lock bag before chilling it in the freezer is the absolute fastest way to bring it down to temp—but, if that means serving the wine out of a plastic bag, is it really worth your post-college dignity?

Others advise wrapping the bottle in a damp cloth before chilling, or plopping it in a fancy ice bucket. I'm no scientist, and I don't pretend to have an exhaustive knowledge of wine, but with the help of my many experienced Serious Eats colleagues, I decided to put these and more methods to the test to find the most efficient way of chilling a bottle of wine, stat.

To test which of these techniques was worth the effort, I cooled nine identical screw-top bottles of white wine using various methods suggested to me by colleagues, plus others that I found online, along with one or two that I came up with myself.

Here are the nine methods that we tested:. I labeled each bottle with the cooling method I'd be testing. Ideally, we would have used a thermometer to take a reading of each bottle's temperature every five seconds, then graphed the results—but alas, we don't have nine of the same thermometer at the Serious Eats test kitchen, and we couldn't engineer a way to place a thermometer in a horizontal bottle of wine, or a zipper-lock bag, without making an enormous mess.

Though it didn't produce absolutely perfect results, I settled for taking the temperature of the wine every five minutes, with Niki's assistance. Whenever the timer went off, we dashed around the kitchen, taking all of the temperature measurements as quickly as possible.

While we were able to take measurements of the bottles chilling in the ice buckets without removing them from the buckets, we had to open the fridge and freezer a number of times to take measurements of the bottles there—and, just as repeatedly opening the oven will bring down its temperature, opening and closing the fridge and freezer lets warm air in and cold air out. We know the wine in both the refrigerator and the freezer would have chilled slightly faster had we been able to take measurements without opening the doors.

Though some methods produced equally slow results, the ideal method stood head and shoulders above the rest. There's a good reason sommeliers put your bottle of white wine in an ice bucket after they pour your first glass: If you've got a big enough container and enough ice, you can surround your wine with icy-cold water, which is always going to cool it faster than cold air. If you don't have an ice bucket or a similarly large container , put your wine in the freezer.

While the horizontal bottle was ready to drink in 60 minutes, the standing one took an extra 25 minutes to get there. We also tried wrapping a bottle of wine in a damp cloth before standing it upright in the freezer, but this method actually seemed to insulate the bottle; it cooled more slowly than the bottle with no cloth wrapped around it.