What temperature should red wine actually be served at?

Cooler than most people serve it. "Room temperature" is a phrase from an era of unheated stone houses, where a room was around 15°C. A modern heated room at 21°C is well above the point where most reds show at their best.

Temperature changes what you perceive. Too warm and alcohol becomes prominent and volatile, the wine smells hot and tastes flabby, and the fruit turns jammy. Too cold and aromatics shut down, tannins feel harsh and astringent, and the wine seems thin.

A workable set of ranges:

• Light reds — Beaujolais, pinot noir, many Italian reds: 12–14°C. Genuinely benefit from twenty minutes in the fridge.
• Medium reds — merlot, chianti, rioja: 15–17°C.
• Full-bodied reds — cabernet sauvignon, syrah, malbec: 16–18°C.
• Whites — 8–12°C; fuller whites like oaked chardonnay at the upper end.
• Sparkling — 6–8°C.

The practical rule that gets you close without a thermometer: take reds out of a warm room and into the fridge for fifteen to twenty minutes; take whites out of the fridge fifteen minutes before serving. Most people serve reds too warm and whites too cold, and both errors are corrected by roughly the same interval in opposite directions.

A wine also warms in the glass, several degrees over the course of a drink, so starting slightly below target is sensible.

One useful consequence: chilling slightly can improve a cheap red, because it suppresses the alcohol burn and the jammy sweetness that cheap warm reds tend to show.

If you keep a wine thermometer, the band-style ones that wrap round the bottle are quicker than the probe type and accurate enough for this purpose. Absent one, a bottle at cellar temperature feels distinctly cool to the back of the hand rather than neutral.