WINES: Why Summer Reds Taste Better Cooler
- Riccardo Lobrano
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
How a wine fridge and a little patience can rescue summer reds from tasting flat, boozy and overdressed
For decades, red wine drinkers have been handed the same instruction: serve at room temperature. It is advice that made sense once, in an era of stone floors and unheated parlours, and makes considerably less sense now, in centrally heated kitchens with the pasta water already at a rolling boil. Historically, room temperature meant something closer to cellar temperature, somewhere between 12°C and 15°C.
Today's rooms often sit at 18°C to 22°C, and warmer still once summer arrives. Pour a red at that temperature and the fruit turns indistinct; the alcohol pushes forward, and a wine that was built for elegance starts to feel overdressed for the occasion.
This is where the wine fridge earns its keep as more than a piece of showroom furniture. Draw a glass at 12°C, particularly with a Coravin, and there is a genuine pleasure in watching it climb toward 18°C in the glass, faster in hot weather than a Briton mentions the forecast. For many styles, that gradual warming is not an inconvenience. It is the entire point.
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