Winehacking Part II

Temperature and Wine part I:

The right temperature can make or break a bottle of wine. Serve a bottle too warm or too cold and the flavor and freshness disappear. Store a bottle at too high a temperature and your nice bottle tastes not all that different than a three dollar bottle of porpoise hork. That said, knowing the right temperature to store and serve is the easy part, its well researched and documented. If you need a great resource on how wine “should” be then check out bettertastingwine.com, their temperature guide is very useful. I realize that you can look up a table on what temperature to serve wine, so I’m going to discuss how to get the wine to that temperature.

Wine should be stored at “cellar temperature” which means somewhere between 52 and 65 degrees F (10 to 18 C). For most people (especially us apartment dwellers) this is nearly impossible outside of purchasing a wine storage unit.

As a rule of thumb, if you that nowhere in your home is the right temperature for wine storage, colder and darker is better. This means that you are going to find the coldest darkest place in your home. Dark is a fairly obvious thing, if you need help with dark then you have other problems. Cold can be tricky. Enter the meat thermometer...

A cheap $10 digital meat thermometer is your best friend for figuring out where that cold dark place where the vinorific magic happens really is. Simply turn the little fella on, sit him down where you are thinking about storing your wine and wait for 10 seconds. Repeat this process a few times until you have found yours spot. It may not be perfect, but its your wine’s home.

In my next installment I'm going to talk about getting your wine to the right temperature for serving.