Summer Wine: From The Wino Papers, Number 8

Yes, that’s an ice cube in my wine glass. Before you oenophiles fire up your keyboards and castigate me for being a tasteless prole, consider this: the room temperature at which wine is ’supposed’ to be served is derived from the temperature of a room in a medieval stone castle, about 57 degrees, not any temperature at which your room happens to be.

How things are ‘supposed’ to be done should have little bearing on how one leads one’s life, but simple guidelines sometimes serve to increase one’s pleasure in certain things. Summer wine needs to be chilled – there it is, a plain and simple guideline.

Consider this – every café, every restaurant, every bar, pub and gin joint around the Mediterranean, from Algeciras at the south west tip of Spain to the happy Isles of Greece serves chilled wine, red, white and rose, in summer. Chilled. Not room temperature, which runs to 98.6 and on a midsummer day can hit 104. Only vampires drink wine at blood temperature or above. The rest of us, from ancient Romans to present day Marseilleais, to this sojourner, enjoy chilled wine in summer. Sometimes we drop in an ice cube. It’s refreshing. Try it.

Yes, I know, summer’s over. But you’ll remember to chill your wine next summer won’t you?