We’re in the thick of it. Summer. And that can spell a challenge for wine lovers, at least in much of southern Canada.
At times like this, a wine drinker’s best accessory is not fancy stemware or a crystal decanter. It’s an ice bucket.
Canadians tend to take their chilling seriously when it comes to lager and soft drinks. We know those beverages can taste unpleasant if consumed too warm. Yet wine, too, is vulnerable to the vagaries of outdoor sipping.
Heat can cause a crisp white, such as pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc, to taste flat. Slowly sipping a ripe, heavily oaked chardonnay in the sun is like watching The Biggest Loser in reverse; its muscles fade and you’re left with a roly-poly butterball.
That’s mainly because the palate’s sensitivity to acidity, a flavour component critical to some wines, as it is to soft drinks, diminishes as the beverage’s temperature rises. It’s a question of balance, and every wine style has its optimal serving temperature.
Even reds can suffer. Subtle aromas can lose their focus, while alcohol can become conspicuous, obscuring the pleasant fruit and yielding a sharp flavour.
So, I read with interest an enlightening experiment conducted by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated for the magazine’s August issue. I love the publication for its creative application of science to cooking methods. “No more soggy pie crust,” reads one recent headline. (Solution: use a preheated baking sheet.) And I especially appreciate its occasional foray into wine-service matters.
The editors have come up with a compelling way to chill wine in a hurry when company’s coming and you’ve forgotten to stash a bottle or two in the fridge. They borrow a technique from the old-fashioned ice-cream churn – using salt to reduce the melting point of ice.
Make a brine in an ice bucket by adding scoops of salt to a mixture of water and ice. Depending on how much salt you’re prepared to sacrifice for the cause, the results can be dramatic. The formula requires submerging a bottle in one quart of water mixed with one cup of table salt and four quarts of ice. A bottle at 24C, typical of summertime room temperature, will reach a fridge-like temperature of 3.3C in 34 minutes.
By contrast, a plain bath of equal parts water and ice takes 105 minutes to chill to the same temperature – an unacceptable predicament unless you plan to serve your pinot grigio with the dessert course. As for the freezer, it took 67 minutes in the experiment, almost twice as long as the brine.
If I may add a note of commentary to the Cook’s Illustrated results, there’s another reason to consider the salt solution instead of the freezer. You’ll avoid the fate that so often befalls a scatter-brained dinner-party host like me – getting lost in conversation or charcoal fanning while the wine freezes solid.
We’re talking white wines, of course. No dry red should be served at fridge temperature. For reds, you’ll want to cut the cooling time so you can just resuscitate the wine from heatstroke. I’m guessing three minutes in the brine and 10 minutes in a plain ice-water bath for most reds. If you feel your cabernet or syrah is too cool, it’s not a big problem. Ample heat in the air will warm your glass within minutes.
The salt idea can seem a bit precious, I know. Not everyone will want to take the trouble or waste 50 cents worth of Sifto on a $10 white. So, here’s another tip from yours truly if speed is an issue.
Use a conventional ice-water bath rather than placing the bottle in the fridge. Contact with cold water draws away heat about 25 times faster than air, assuming the same temperature for both. It’s the reason that tumbling into a frigid lake is more lethal than streaking in winter, not to mention less fun. And if you want to risk a run at the freezer, power to you.
At the risk of undermining the good research of those Cook’s Illustrated editors, I must also add that all this talk about chilling is one-sided: It’s an accepted truth among wine experts that many whites are served too cold.
A lean, tart pinot grigio might be nice fridge-cold, or a few degrees higher as it warms in the glass (about 8 C seems optimal to me), but many other styles show their best at higher temperatures. The esteemed U.S. wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. tends to like his whites between 13 and 16C, considerably warmer than your 4C fridge.
“If they are chilled to below 45F [7C] it will be difficult to tell, for instance, whether the wine is a riesling or a chardonnay,” he writes in Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide. I’m with him on that score, especially when it comes to chardonnay.
The truth was driven home to me recently when I pulled a very good B.C. wine, Black Hills Chardonnay 2008, from the fridge. It may not exactly have tasted like a riesling at first, but the flavours were muted, not worthy of the $29.90 price. Only after a second pour from the room-warmed bottle 15 minutes later did it unfold with opulent fruit and balanced complexity.
I might not bother reaching for the salt for that one.
