WinePedia™ FAQs

What temperature should I drink this wine at?

by Stephen Reiss, Ph.D., Certified Wine Educator - wineducation.com

I hear this question more than any other.

The temperature to drink wine at is one of those personal preferences that too often is espoused as fact.

I personally tend to drink all of my dry wine directly out of the cellar. Red wines warm up quickly in the glass, and the evolution of flavors is fun to observe. For white wines I use a chilled marble cooler to keep the wine cool, but not cold.

For Champagne or sparkling wine I refrigerate the wine for several hours and then keep it around 40 degrees by keeping it in ice (but no water in the bucket).

Sweet wines I like very cold, so I chill them in salted ice water (it only takes them about 5 minutes to cool if they were previously in the cellar). I keep the sweet wine in the freezing brine mixture to keep it as cold as possible.

What is more certain is to not let any wine become too warm. A red wine as cool 80F degrees will taste noticeably alcoholic. White wine is more delicate and therefore has less to disguise the alcohol and other less pleasant aspects of the wine, and so is more easily enjoyed when it is actually cooler that 60F. Sweet wines paradoxically, can actually be served quite warm (as Ports and other fortified wines are). I prefer my sweet white wine to be very cold, but they do not have as much alcohol to interfere with the flavor, and the residual sugar masks pretty much everything else.

Experiment to find your own preferences, but don't stress on finding the exact correct temperature. No matter what you decide on there will always be an expert (other than myself) that will disagree with you.

---