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"Cool It Down"

As the days in August heat up, your wines likely follow suit, so here are a few tips for cooling down your wines and keeping them at the proper serving temps as the sun blazes on your outdoor activities!


A great way to hold your Chardonnay at bay and an innovative way to repurpose that old-school poolside staple, keep your wine cold with two beer koozies. Securing one koozie over the bottom of the wine bottle and fitting the other on top through the koozie's bottom hole will help the temp remain low. The koozies don't cover the entire bottle, but they will insulate the bottom and the top, which is good enough to keep the bottle chilled for about three hours. A bonus is that the uncovered middle of the bottle offers a way to read the label, especially if multiple bottles go around at once.


There’s a cool gadget called the corksicle, a liquid-filled wand that you freeze and then insert into the bottle to keep the juice cold. While this gadget cannot chill room-temp wine down to proper drinking levels, it does a fine job maintaining the temps of an already chilled bottle of white and shines when chilling red wines quickly to cellar temperature.

If you wrap a damp kitchen towel around a room temp bottle of wine and then place it in the freezer and for about an hour, your party can proceed. This method demonstrates science hard at work as the water in the towel transfers heat away from the bottle more quickly than the air can, so the wine will cool much faster than going into the freezer jacketless.

Pouring a whole bottle of room temp wine into a new & clean zip lock bag and plopping it into the freezer may sound like the latest way to create DIY frosé, but it’s a great way to prep for service if you’re running short of time. In just 20 minutes, the wine will be well in the range of palatability and ready to drink, as long as you can minimize the spillage that can occur as you funnel the frosty liquid back into its bottle or a decanter.

Saving this one for last is not surprising as it is the most widely used method of chilling wine across the globe. Simply fill a bucket with ice and enough cold water to fully submerge the wine bottle. And then, relying on science again, mix in a couple of cups of kosher salt. After a few minutes, as you wait for the bottle to achieve optimum chill, lift the wine and move it around in the ice bath a bit, and then place the bottle back down into the ice and continue to wait. In 15 minutes, the wine will be perfect!. Since salt lowers the freezing point of the water, the salty ice water gets the wine colder than regular ice water.

We hope that these tricks can come in handy this Summer as we all lift our glasses and try to stay cool!


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