"Red wine always has a place at the table! Even when the mercury rises!", says Top Wine SA's Mike Froud. 

Hot summer days, al fresco lunches, poolside parties… Time for chilled white wine or rosé… Or not! An increasing number of us also enjoy red wine with our meals or on its own even when the sun is beating down and the temperature outside climbs over 30ºC – even when it reaches into the 40s. Reds can also be refreshing, if you’d like them to be, although for starters you (or your host) would do well to remember the basics – one of which is that besides glühwein, no wine is meant to be drunk warm, let alone hot.

As most wine lovers know full well, reds are usually meant to be enjoyed at around 18 degrees, never above 20 – which may well mean putting them in the fridge or ice-bucket for an hour or so before serving. In fact, when the air temp is high, many routinely chill red wines down to 16 or 14 deg, allowing for how the bottles will start to warm up after opening and put on the table or drinks trolley, so that they are ‘just right’ by the time they’re served.

Of course the ‘perfect’ temperature for red wine to be served at can vary according to the grape variety and/or the style of wine. Even at the dinner table when the room temperature isn’t uncomfortably warm, medium- to light-bodied reds are more likely to benefit from being poured at temps lower than what’s normally recommended for full-bodied styles. There are some wines made from Pinot Noir, Grenache Noir or Cinsault, for example, that the cellarmaster will tell you are always best served chilled – closer to 12 deg or 10 deg even, allowing for how they’ll warm up in the glass.

And what about putting ice in your red wine? It’s pretty much the same as putting ice cubes into a glass of white, a practice less frowned on these days – provided that you’re mindful of the diluting effect as the ice melts.  It would be questionable, to say the least, to put even a small block of frozen H₂O into a very fine wine, but there are modest tipples and easy-drinking quaffers that won’t exactly metamorphosise if watered down just a little…

The science behind it all, as in how and why a wine, like most if not all beverages, smells and tastes different depending on how hot or cold it is, can get complicated. Suffice to say that the cooler it is, the more subtle the characteristics of the wine will be (too cold and they will be subdued altogether), whereas the warmer the wine is, the more the characteristics are amplified (eventually to the point of off-putting). For the aficionados or cognoscenti, savouring a red wine can be all the more enjoyable while experiencing its evolution due to both aeration and temperature change, which is all the more noticeable on a hot summer’s day as the wine warms from somewhere in the chilled spectrum, to so-called perfect, to when it’s ‘time to drink up’.

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