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How to cool wine quickly. 5 failsafe tips

14/07/2020 Wine service

Have your guests arrived before you’ve remembered to cool the wine? Don’t panic! Here at Decántalo, we want to give you a few tips you can use to get your drinks to the right temperature as quickly as possible.

cool wine

5 tips for cooling wine 

1.- The fastest and most effective: ice bucket, ice, water and salt

A quick, effective and non-invasive way to cool a wine is to put it in an ice bucket filled with water, a handful of salt and ice. The bottle must be fully covered to cool quickly and evenly. A few minutes will be enough to get your wine to the optimum serving temperature.

2.- Bottle, paper and freezer

A freezer might not be the best thing for wine because sudden changes in temperature are not good for them, but if you need an emergency cooling method, the following tip might be your best option.

One of the fastest, most useful and effective tricks to cool closed bottles quickly is to wrap them in kitchen roll and wet them before putting them in the freezer for just a few minutes, depending on the wine and its optimal serving temperature. You could also use newspaper or damp kitchen roll to wrap the bottles before putting them in the freezer.

If you want to make your wine even cooler, wet the paper or kitchen roll and sprinkle salt on it before wrapping the bottle. 

3.- Ice in the wine?

Fashion for some, sacrilege for others. Without a doubt, putting ice in a wine glass is an invasive way to cool it because the wine will become slightly diluted as the ice melts, which will completely change its characteristics and personality and ultimately that is not what we want. Obviously it is all about taste and tastes create new ways of enjoying wine, so some producers have created wines and sparkling wines specifically for adding ice cubes to. Why don’t you give them a try?

4.- How about using frozen fruit instead of ice?

How about serving your wine with some frozen grapes in? The fruit will have the same effect as an ice cube but without altering the wine’s organoleptic qualities, and this could be a classy way of handing your guests a beautiful looking drink. These would be great to serve on a summer afternoon. Imagine the striking look of a glass of rose wine with frozen red berries in it?

You can also buy cubes made from different materials that you keep in the freezer and that work like ice cubes. They will cool your drinks without diluting them. Another practical option that you can have ready in your fridge to cool drinks quickly without altering the flavour.

5.- Reds in summer

People say that red wines should be enjoyed at room temperature but a summer day is not the same as a winter afternoon. To appreciate all the qualities and character of a wine, you need to know what temperature to serve it, depending on its style. 

With red wines, if you don’t have a wine cellar to store and serve it at the right temperature, then just put them in the fridge for a few minutes, which will cool them more gently than the freezer. The idea is not to serve them cold but to cool them slightly so that they are at the perfect temperature when served, or perhaps a couple of degrees below their ideal temperature so that on a warm day, they maintain all their characteristics as they heat up slightly in the glass.

As you can see, there are various ways to make sure your wines are in the best condition for serving, but our best advice is not to leave it to chance, at Decántalo, we have so many good wines to choose from, but don’t forget to keep them at the right serving temperature so that you can enjoy them at their best at any time of the year.

Image by Andrés Gómez @andresloquesea

Original source Unsplash.com

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