You want to open the bottle and pour it. Understandable. But doing it carelessly costs you something, and a few small habits make a real difference to what ends up in the glass. Here is how to serve wine properly.
Picking The Glasses
A good part of the pleasure comes from the glass. Not all glasses suit all wines. Picture an aged red in a Champagne flute. It does not work, and there is a reason.
The idea goes back to the late 1980s, when the Austrian glassmaker Georg Riedel released a range called Vinum: affordable crystal in different shapes for different wines. Plenty of people said the shape made no difference. Riedel ran comparative tastings to prove otherwise, and even beginners could pick the difference. In 1996 he was named Decanter Man of the Year.
None of which means you need expensive crystal. Budget glasses do the job. What you want is variety: a few with a wide bowl and a decent stem for reds, narrower ones for whites, and flutes for anything sparkling, where the shape holds the bubbles.
Getting The Temperature Right
Nobody enjoys a warm soft drink, and wine is far more sensitive than that. Serve an aromatic white too cold and the aromatics disappear entirely. Serve a red too warm and all you taste is alcohol.
You do not need a wine thermometer. Fifteen to twenty minutes in the fridge will chill most whites, and longer for the fuller ones. Just set a timer, because forgetting a bottle in the fridge is the most common mistake there is.
Rough guide:
- Sweet white wines: 6 to 8 C
- Light dry whites: 8 to 10 C
- Full-bodied whites: 10 to 13 C
- Sparkling wines: 8 to 10 C
- Crisp rosés: 8 to 10 C
- Full-bodied rosés: 10 to 12 C
- Light reds: 12 to 14 C
- Full-bodied reds: 15 to 18 C
Note that last one. Room temperature in a heated house is well above 18 C, so most reds are served too warm in this country. Twenty minutes in the fridge before serving is usually right.
Opening The Bottle
This deserves a section, because everyone has had a cork disintegrate into the bottle at least once.
Cut the foil below the lip and take it off. Set the tip of the corkscrew slightly off centre, then straighten it so the spiral goes down the middle of the cork. That is what stops it tearing.
Count your turns. Around seven gets you deep enough on a standard cork without going through the bottom. Some corks need fewer. Older bottles have long corks and need care, because those are the ones most likely to crumble.
If a cork does break up, pour the wine through a fine strainer. It is a fault of the cork, not of the wine.
Decanting
To decant or not. There is a lot of confusion here, mostly because people use decanting and aerating to mean the same thing. They are not.
Decanting is about separating the wine from sediment. It applies to older reds, where sediment has formed over years in bottle. Hold the bottle up to a light and you will see whether there is any.
Stand the bottle upright for a day beforehand so the sediment settles at the bottom. Then pour slowly and steadily into the decanter, in one movement, watching the neck. Stop as soon as the sediment reaches it.
One warning. Very old, fragile wines can fall apart on contact with air within minutes. If a bottle has decades on it, decant it at the table and drink it straight away.
Aerating
Aerating means giving the wine air so it opens up. Young, structured reds benefit most, because air softens the tannin and brings the aromatics forward.
Older wines want the opposite. They have already had all the slow oxygen they need, and more will flatten them.
You do not need a decanter for this. Open the bottle and leave it, or just pour a glass and let it sit for ten minutes. Swirling in the glass does most of the work.
Pouring
A 750ml bottle gives you five servings of about 150ml each.
Fill a glass no more than a third, or half at the very most for a red. The empty space is not wasted, it is where the aromatics collect. Overfill it and you get less out of the wine, not more.
Holding The Glass
Hold it by the stem, near the base, between thumb and forefinger. Then swirl.
The reason is practical rather than about etiquette. Hold a glass by the bowl and your hand warms the wine, which undoes everything you did with the temperature. There is no need for the raised little finger.
Keeping What Is Left
Cork it and put it in the fridge, reds included. It slows the oxidation considerably.
An open bottle gives you three to five days depending on the wine, so drink it while it is good. Keep it away from sunlight and heat.
That is the whole of it. None of it takes more than a minute, and all of it shows in the glass. Have a look at the range when you need something to practise on.