Wine: when to chill bottles

I hesitate to return to the subject of my recent kitchen refit, a column that upset so many readers that moderators ended up removing a quarter of the comments below the line. But there is one more thing I want to say on the subject, and that is the effect of having a new fridge. It’s so efficient that bottles that would have taken a couple of hours to chill in my old fridge are now cold inside 20 minutes, which means that practically every white I’m drinking these days ends up over-chilled. Given that many readers will have a modern fridge, too, rather than a clapped-out contraption such as my previous model, I suspect that your wine is too cold as well.

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There are, of course, wines that benefit from being served cold, among them crisp, young, unoaked whites and rosés, sparkling wines and sweet wines; in fact, I’d go so far as to say the sweeter the wine, the colder it needs to be. I would, for example, give a German spätlese such as the gloriously sweet Ungsteiner Scheurebe 2015 (£12.50 The Wine Society; 11.5% abv) at least an hour in the fridge. Then I’d drink the wine, which has 42g of residual sugar, with a Thai duck curry or a passionfruit pavlova.

But other, more full-bodied whites benefit less from being so cold. If you over-chill them, you lose the appealing sensation of richness in southern French wines such as the Wine Atlas Marsanne 2015 (at £5.47, a good buy from Asda; 12.5% abv) or the lush Château La Canorgue Blanc 2015 (£13.50 Yapp Brothers; 14% abv) – and if you’re paying that kind of money for the latter (which is well worth it, by the way), why deprive yourself of part of the pleasure?

My new fridge is, however, marvellous at bringing down the temperature of reds, which, unless you’re lucky enough to have a proper wine cellar, are almost invariably served too warm. Look at the back label of even a full-bodied red, and the winemaker will in all likelihood recommend serving it at 17-18C, which is at least a couple of degrees cooler than many living rooms.

Chilling definitely suits lighter reds such as beaujolais, and also corrects the sometimes jammy sweetness of cheaper pinots such as Aldi’s Estevez Pinot Noir 2015 (13.5% abv); but who’s complaining when it costs less than a fiver (£4.79 to be precise)? The only reds I wouldn’t chill are older vintages, which I’d instead leave in an unheated room for a couple of hours. Or maybe in a fancy fridge for 10-15 minutes.

matchingfoodandwine.com