Transcript:
Hello, bonjour, and welcome to your new Bonner Private Wine video. Today, I want to answer a simple but very important and useful question to answer that many wine connoisseurs asks themselves and asks me sometimes: Should you chill your red wine? Should I chill it? Should you chill your red wine before serving it, or just serve it at room temperature?
What's the best way to find out? And I've set up a little experiment for you right here.
The short answer is that it depends. On what? Mainly your room temperature. Most red wines should be served at around 64 degrees Fahrenheit, and most rooms are kept at around 68, 70 degrees. So a little too warm. If you ask me to serve them at room temperature.
But if your room is chilled enough, let's say in winter and it's around 64, 65, 66 degrees, then that may be fine. So in winter, if your room is not to heated up, if you don't have a fireplace or a lot of heat in your room, then room temperature will be fine.
But in summer, unless you have strong air conditioning, well, your room is likely to be more around 68, 70, 72. And that's going to be a little too warm, in which case you would want to chill your red wine a little bit. Half an hour, 45 minutes in the fridge before serving it, just to cool it down a little bit. To elaborate it on this point and to prove this point or disprove this point, we'll find out, I have two bottles of the exact same wine.
This is a wine from the south of the Rhone Valley in France. So this is a 40%—14% alcohol wine. So a fairly strong wine similar to a Chateauneuf-du-pape or Rhone blend. If you wish this bottle right here, I've left at room temperature in a room that would that's about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. This one I have put in the fridge for about one hour before shooting this video.
So I've pushed the chilling, maybe a little more to get a bit of a better difference between the two. And I want to taste those two wines and see if I can find a difference in tasting and how they express themselves. So let's start with the wine at room temperature. We don't expect any difference in the color, so let's not worry about this.
Let's smell first. I'm getting quite a lot of strawberry fruit. It's quite vibrant a wine, a lot of spices. I'm getting quite a lot of oaky characters as well. A lot of nutmeg and sandalwood as well. So it's quite spicy and a bit of chocolate and coffee as well. Let's taste briefly. Good fruit, lots of spiciness, a lot of chocolate.
And I'm feeling quite a lot of power as well. A lot of alcohol, especially from the back of the palate. At the end of the tasting, the wine really comes back really strongly, really, really powerful on the back end of the palate with a lot of cooked fruit as well cooked apple jammed strawberry, these type of flavors, a bit of raisin as well.
Solid tannins, a really good balanced wine, as I said, similar to a Chateauneuf-du-Pape. This is an appellation called Vacqueyras, a very good value from the south of Rhone. If you want a Chateauneuf type of wine, but at a better price Vacqueyras is always a go to wine, at least for me. Let's try the chilled wine, which would be at around 62 degrees.
I would say 60 to 62 degrees at this point. Let's see if it tastes and smell any different. Well, first off, I don't smell it all that well here. It's actually a little bit shyer in this case, which you may find if you chill your red wine, especially if they haven't been decanted, those two haven't been. So this this one feels a bit tighter, a bit shyer, probably because of the temperature.
And that's going to be a consequence of that. But I can definitely smell the fresh fruit aromas here, the fresh strawberry rather than the jam ones. I don't smell as much cocoa beans or coffee or spices here either. So it's really about the fresh, fruity expression and red berries that I'm getting on the nose. And I have to be honest here, I'm not getting the whole spectrum of aromas that I'm getting from this one.
You know, that's a point that we'll have to consider when we make our conclusion here. Let's taste. Mm hmm.
I can sense taste that the wine is definitely cooler on my palate. It's probably a little too chilled. As I said, I chilled it for about an hour, which is probably a little too much. Half an hour would have been enough. It's still the end of winter, so that room is not all that warm. Although I'm getting a big punch, I can feel the acidity and the freshness of the fruit flavors a lot more.
They just jump out of the glass and into my mouth when I taste this wine. And then as the wine slowly warms up in my mouth on the palate, then the spices start kicking in and I'm getting the chocolate, the coffee, all the different spices, the nutmeg that come through. So I'm getting a way fresher, big burst of red berry aromas that I actually like a lot in this wine.
So the smell is a little bit tighter, too. You don't smell that one all that well in this case, but way fresher, big burst in tighter tasting experience. While the warmer wine tends to be looser on the palate, it goes straight into the cook fruit and all the spices. So I'm enjoying that experience a little less. And that's also a personal preference.
That's definitely an experiment that I would advise you to make. Take your favorite wine and apply the same experiment. Chill, chill one bottle and keep the wine the other one at room temperature and see which one you like best. That's going to be the best way to find out in absolute or subjectively how you prefer your tasting experience.
For most wines, especially those ones that are 14% plus in alcohol, chilling them is going to reveal the freshness that it's deep inside the wine a lot more than if you obviously serve it warmer, which is going to reveal more of the weight in the power of the alcoholic content than all the cooked fruit that's inside. It's going to be slightly different if you have a lighter wine, a 12%, 12 and a half percent like a Burgundy or cool climate pinot noir, those can be served a little warmer because they're going to be shyer and tighter wines to start with.
So you can open them up a little bit with a bit of a warmer temperature. They will — they're going to be too tight if they're chilled those wines. But the powerful, punchy wines, your Argentina malbec, for example, do benefit from being chilled, 64, 62 degrees in temperature, and the wine will slowly warm up in the glass. It will reveal itself by the minute, and it will reveal itself by warming up on your palate as well.
This is my take on, this was my take on, should you chilled your red wine? Yes, you should a little bit. And now, you know, thanks for watching. I hope this video was useful. I hope you enjoyed you know, we'll see you soon into wonderful world of vino. Cheers.