The Right Temperature - Not too hot, not too cold.

Paolo Tullio

07 June 2011

It's generally understood that you drink whites cold and reds warm, and broadly speaking that's true. Still, you can enjoy your wines much more if you take a closer look. It's essentially true that the colder you drink a wine the less of its flavours will be apparent. You can turn this to your advantage if you have a thin, tart little white and nothing else to drink. Drink it very cold indeed and you might just be able to finish the bottle.

It's generally understood that you drink whites cold and reds warm, and broadly speaking that's true. Still, you can enjoy your wines much more if you take a closer look. It's essentially true that the colder you drink a wine the less of its flavours will be apparent. You can turn this to your advantage if you have a thin, tart little white and nothing else to drink. Drink it very cold indeed and you might just be able to finish the bottle.

The obverse of this is that good whites are ruined by being served too chilled. If you should ever be lucky enough to have a fine white Burgundy, such as Corton Charlemagne or Clos des Mouches, try drinking it at the sort of temperature that cold water comes out of a tap and see how the flavours explode onto your palate. This holds true of dessert wines as well. I prefer them no cooler than cellar temperature.

In restaurants where they often serve your white wine in an ice-bucket, the problem is this; as you work your way slowly through your bottle over the course of your meal, it's gets colder and colder. On balance I prefer those insulated surrounds which keep the wine at a near constant temperature.

This effect of temperature on flavour is the same for reds. Normally a red is designed by the viticulturist to be drunk in the 17-20 degrees Celsius range, which shows the wine off to its best advantage. However, a very fruity and very young red, for example a Beaujolais Nouveau, benefits from being chilled. A rough guide might be that the fruitier the red the cooler you can drink it, the more tannic, the more it needs to approach room temperature.

All wines need a balance of fruit and acidity, but reds have another ingredient: tannin. Tannin acts as a preservative and imparts a tartness to the flavour. This is dissipated when a wine is decanted by the process of aeration. Wines with a high tannin content will need to be decanted and allowed to stand for an hour or two before drinking. When you're planning a meal with wine that presents no problem, but if you have a sudden and impromptu notion for a glass of red wine, you won't have time to decant and chambre highly tannic wines. You need one of those wines that's immediately palatable, right from the moment of uncorking. Australians are very good at producing this kind of wine, and many of their reds will fill this bill.