Say you get home from a hard day of work and all you want from life is a nice refreshing glass of Sauvignon Blanc. But when you finally kick off your shoes and head to the kitchen, you realize that your wine has been sitting out on the counter all day. Sure, you could drink it at room temperature but wine will never be great when it hasn’t been chilled. Fear not – we’ve teamed up with Matua to give you 5 simple and effective methods that will help you chill your wine with ease.
The best part? With Matua’s new chill check you’ll know exactly when your wine is at the optimum drinking temperature, just look out for the iconic snowflake to activate on the bottle. Worry not wine-warrior, we have your back, so follow this ABC guide and #getreadytochill.
A Frozen Grape
Keep some frozen grapes in your freezer, and when you need to cool off your wine plop a few of them in. Unlike an ice cube, grapes won’t melt and dilute your wine. They may influence the flavor a bit if you leave them in for a while, so you might want to fish them out as soon as your wine is cool. But if you do decide to leave them in, you’ll have a tasty snack waiting for you at the bottom of your glass.
Bottle in Freezer
Sticking a wine bottle in the freezer is a common sense approach, but if not done properly it will take nearly as long to cool down as it would in the fridge. Before you slide the bottle in next to the icemaker, take some dishtowels (or paper towels in a pinch), soak them through with cold water, and wrap them around your bottle. The wine will get cold a lot faster if it’s surrounded by cold water instead of cold air. You’ll get definite improvement in ten minutes.
Chill individual servings
Pop the cork and serve the wine into glasses. Cover the tops of the glasses with something like saran wrap and put those into the refrigerator, or even the freezer. Smaller volumes of liquid cool quicker, so the wine will be ready to drink much faster than trying to cool down an entire bottle. This works well if you’re trying to please a large group of people, and has the added benefit of giving everyone a chilled glass—their wine will end up staying cooler for longer.
Pre-chilled helpers
One solution is to buy products that you keep in your freezer in case of emergency. There are plenty of metal wine stones on the market that you can keep frozen and plop into your glass at any point. There are also insulated wine glasses, which you could just use in non-emergency situations to keep your wine cooler for longer. The only problem with these is they tend to come without a stem so you won’t look as fancy.
Ice Bucket
Everyone knows about the ice bucket method, if only because we’ve all wanted to be the person with a bottle of champagne at the beach. As long as your bucket is deep enough to have ice around most of the bottle, it’ll work pretty well, but there are a few tricks to make this work even better. You should always have a mixture of ice and water in the bucket so every possible molecule of the bottle has something cold next to it. You can also use salty water—it will actually have a lower freezing point and the water (and your wine) will be colder.
