Wine and Temperature

As I sit now, the weather in the Napa Valley is hitting over 100 degrees and I would not go out and buy wine.   The reason for this is that you can quickly cook wine in your car if you aren’t careful.  Plus if you have it shipped you can never tell if they are going to ship it so the wine is kept cool. So you may pay to ship it, only to have it get cooked in shipping.  Of course, needless to say, cooking your wine ruins it.

Now people store their wine many ways and of course the optimum would be a fancy specially built wine closet that is temperature controlled and carefully monitored, but here are some simple rules of thumb.  When storing wine make sure you don’t have wild temperature swings.  It can be almost as bad to store wine too cold, as it is to store it too hot.  Temperatures that makes you sweat will make the wine sweat.  So a cool dark place would be best, and kept roughly 55 degrees.

As for drinking wine, the rule of thumb to keep in mind is that red wines typically are drunk in warmer temperatures and white wines in cooler. But, you don’t want to drink them too cold or you lose everything.  At the same time you don’t want to drink wine as its getting cooked. So take a look at the below chart for what temperature your wine should be.