I just got a wine refrigerator and have some basic questions (am new at this whole wine collecting thing. LOL).
Red wine should be drank cool… cellar temp or so, right? White wine should be colder. So how do I store both kinds in the same fridge without making one too hot or the other too cold? Is it a matter of keeping the temp fairly cold and letting the red wine warm up to room temperature before drinking? Or am I missing something here?
Well, a really nice one has three temperature zones, for red, white, and sparkling. I’m assuming you didn’t spring for the thousand dollar model, though.
For one that didn’t, I’d just keep my white in the fridge and my red in a rack, hopefully somewhere relatively cool (as you correctly put it, cellar-cool, not room temperature).
I’d love to have a wine fridge, just to free up the space in my fridge-fridge.
in italy at the moment it is stinking hot. there is nothing nicer than an ice cold red straight out of the fridge
I’d suggest to slightly modify this method. Just keep all of your wines in the wine fridge at cellar temp. This helps maintain the wine. When you want a wine cooler than put it in the fridge ahead of time. Or if you want to cool a wine quickly then place it in a bucket with ice, salt and water ahead of time. This should just take a few minutes to put a good chill on the wine.
And some reds drink better cold than others (IMO very fruity reds taste good at a relatively cold temp on hot summer days).
Sounds easy enough, and close to what we’ve been doing. Thanks everyone!
Not sure on wine fridges, but a rule of thumb I’ve seen with regular fridges is 20 minutes - take a fully-cold white out of the fridge 20 minutes before serving, and pop a room temp red into the fridge for 20 minutes before serving.