Imagine you have a white wine bottle which is too warm. Say you just came home from the wine store and it was on a regular shelf so it was lukewarm. You want to have it with dinner.

How would you cool down the wine, or would you just drink it lukewarm?

Depends on the wine and the circumstances - oh, you gave us the circumstances.

For a quick chill of a decent wine, I use the freezer. Too much of a pain in the behind to go the ice bucket route.

For yesterday's leftover wine that i didn't put back in the fridge, I might drink it room temp, or, horror of horrors, I might drop an ice cube or two into a glass.

I think we might be an anomaly here, but our freezer is a side-by-side freezer (it's on the left, the fridge is on the right) and I don't think there's be room to put a wine bottle in there. We tend to keep it pretty stuffed with frozen steamable veggies. So for us, I have some plastic ice cubes which I drop into the glass itself, to get that glass down to temperature without melting into it. It can sort of self regulate that way, if it's getting close to a good temperature I pull out a cube so it cools more slowly. Plus the fish are cute

Lisa and Brom,

We have an ice pack that covers the white wine bottles for a quick or sustaining chill. We usually keep a few of them in the freezer so that they are always ready to go. The plastic ice cubes are a good idea too:)

Yeah, the non-melting ice cubes would be handy. I could use them in a good wine.

I was over at the Aboutdotcom site and they had some ridiculous wine chilling advice.

One, they said never put wine in a freezer (several sites actually give this advice)

Second, they said do not leave your wine in the fridge because - get ready for this one - within just a few days, it may become corked!

I think that if you try the chill packs that set around the bottles, you will really like them. I use them alot when hosting weinprobes (wine tastings). But I caution you to go ahead and spend the extra cash for the better ones because they freeze better and stay for longer. Try it and let me know what you think.

I don't think anyone is doubting that these chill packs work. However, I also don't think anyone is complaining about the methods of chilling they currently use.

I can tell you that I don't intend to try the chill packs, since I already have a couple of methods that work just fine and doesn't cost anything - especially not "extra". Thanks anyway for the suggestion.

Do you use these for travel? Might have some useful application in that circumstance, as wine bottles are not particularly well-suited to Igloo coolers.

On that question, I try to keep a couple of suitable whites in the fridge for moment's notice dashes to restaurants. (Not wines like the Corton Charlemagne - I hardly ever drink Grand Cru Burgundies without planning ahead.)

How about youse guys? Do you try to keep one on the chill? How about sparkling wines? Are you prepared to enjoy Sekts at a moment's notice, WeinMs?

heh, heh, heh. Myself, I like Sekts at any time.

You probably recall that I used to run the wine site there and we parted ways for several reasons, one was that I'd become really upset at the huge volume of ads they ran. I was fairly surprised that the person they brought in to replace me was distributing very questionable advice to people.

This really takes the cake though. A fridge will cause **corking issues**?? It makes me so, so glad that I parted ways with them.

lol Brom

I do have some of those sleeve wine chillers. To me they chill very slowly. They are certainly better than nothing! They do a good job, if you already have a cool bottle of wine, of keeping it cool as you sit out on a back porch and sip wine all evening long. So I do like them for that purpose.

However if a wine is already warm I find the fastest way to cool down one glass is to drop a few plastic cubes into that one glass and do it directly and easily.

We keep most of our wine in wine fridges, except for one rack of reds which are drink-soon reds. That being said, the wine fridge is at a storage temp (say 55F) and not a drinking temp (which might be 45F for a given white). So I drop a few cubes into the wine to account for that. I don't normally worry about moving a wine from the wine fridge to the regular fridge and then trying to warm it up again.

Brom,

We actually have a cellar, so all the wines are kept there. And of course, I love my Sekt and Secco, so they are always ready to go!! Never know when you will need them As for the Reds, kinda have to plan ahead otherwise you end up "hugging" the glass so it warms up. I try to keep at least a few of those on the winerack.

WeinMs