It's summer and the livin' is easy, but spare a thought for your wine.
Summer heat poses real challenges if you're dining outdoors, whether you're at the cottage, on a boat, on a picnic or simply having a barbecue on the back deck.
Serving temperature can make or break a wine, and what you don't want to do is offer your guests wine that's not in good condition -- or, worse, drink it yourself. Wine that's too warm loses the flavour and texture that it's meant to have. Whites lose their crispness and reds can become coarse and unbalanced.
It's usually easy to deal with heat, of course. Just make sure that you have some kind of cooling method (like ice and water) or insulation that will keep your wine at the right temperature.
That's easier in some situations -- if you're at home you can just keep the bottle inside -- than others, but it's worth investing the effort. If you can keep your cheese from melting in the heat, you can keep your wine cool, too.
There are no hard and fast rules for the temperature wine should be served at, although you'll find books telling you that this wine should be served at 14 degreesC and that one at 16 degreesC. In practice, hardly anyone tries to fine-tune temperature so precisely, and you'd drive yourself demented if you did.
Even if you got the wine to 14, you'd have a tough job keeping it there. Take it out of an ice bucket and it will warm up; leave it in and it'll cool down. The only solution would be to get it to 14 and drink it as quickly as possible.
As a rule, white wines should be served cold and reds should be cool. That is, reds should feel cool when they first enter your mouth. If you can't feel that cool sensation, the wine is far too warm.
What to do then? If possible, use an ice bucket or any container (a bucket, a big bowl) where you can immerse the bottle up to its neck. Fill the container with water and ice. Ice alone isn't as effective, because it cools the wine only where ice comes into contact with the bottle. Don't worry if you get odd looks when you put red wine in ice. You're just bringing it down to a cool temperature, not chilling it to white-wine temperature.
Think of it this way: We've all heard that red wine should be served at "room temperature," right? I'd like to find out who first used that term, because it's become meaningless. Travel around the city and you'll find room-temperature variations of five or six degrees during the summer. And if you're eating outside, is the deck a "room?" So should your Bordeaux or California Cab be served at 30? I don't think so.
All this is to say that it's worth getting the temperature of your wine right so that you can enjoy it the way the winemaker intended. Don't worry if you over-chill the wine; it'll warm up, especially in the glass.
Once you've taken care of temperature, it's pretty much smooth sailing, even if you're not afloat.
Four varied wines today, all suitable for summer dining.