Bread is Pain

No, the 15 minute rule does not pertain to how long something can sit on the floor before you eat it. That’s the 15 second rule. Okay, the 10 second rule. In any case, it’s not what I’m talking about here. The 15 minute rule is a simple strategy to remember how to serve wine at the proper temperature. The idea is that you should keep white, fruity or sparkling wines in the refrigerator and remove them 15 minutes before serving, and red wines on the rack and place them in the refrigerator 15 minutes before serving. White in then out for 15, red out then in for 15.

Why? The temperature of things greatly affects how you perceive their flavor. Cold dulls the flavor of food. For example, a chilled soup, like gazpacho, must be more heavily seasoned than a hot one, like minestrone. Vichyssoise to be served hot must be seasoned differently than when served cold – seasoned to perfection to be served chilled and reheated would result in a salty and unbalanced soup. Even frozen desserts, like ice cream, benefit from a bit of warming after coming directly out of the freezer before being consumed. The same effect happens with wine.

The ideal temperature for wine lies somewhere between 10 and 18 degrees Celsius, depending on the type of wine served, with sparkling wines like Champagne at the coldest end of the spectrum and a full bodied red like a Bordeaux at the warmest. This ideal temperature is often printed on the label of the bottle and, if not, is covered in much more extensive detail elsewhere on the Internet.

The basic idea is that cold tends to dull sweetness and pronounce bitterness, so serving crisp wines chilled gives them a sense of refreshment, rather than a reminiscence of syrup. This is especially important with dessert wines. Flavor notes often apparent in light wines, like citrus, coincide with the refreshing qualities a cool temperature provides and are more properly enjoyed at a lower temperature than reds.

Since the tannins (what makes red wine bitter) become more pronounced when chilled too much, as well as their other complexes muted, this upsets the balance of a red wine and makes it less palatable. Flavor notes for red wines, like cherry, are best presented closer to room temperature, as though fruit served straight from the tree or vine.

I conducted a simple test using a wine bottle filled with water to see how much the temperature would actually be affected. Obviously water and wine are two different substances (unless you’re Jesus, in which case you can make it up as you go along), but I figured that it would give me a reasonable estimate as to how much 15 minutes of chilling or warming would affect the temperature. In both cases, the temperature of the water changed approximately 3 degrees Celsius.

So, with a normal room temperature of 20-21 degrees Celsius, this 3 degree change might not be quite significant enough for the fullest of red wines, but should be perfectly acceptable for lighter wines. Even if not exact for a white, it is incredibly easy to bring the white wine up to the correct temperature: simply do nothing until that temperature is achieved in your glass.

I’m no sommelier, but it stands to reason that ice buckets might not be the ideal environment for all wines then. A white wine purchased off the shelf and placed into a bucket of ice will probably chill sufficiently in 15-20 minutes and then is probably best removed, at least temporarily, but a red wine kept in a bucket of ice would simply end up far too cold by the time food hit the table. Champagne, on the other hand, will be right at home.