Every style · one scale

Serving temperature

The cheapest improvement available to any bottle you already own, and the one most people get wrong in both directions.

Serving temperature

Select a style for the reasoning. Note where the fridge and a heated room actually sit.

FridgeCellarHeated room
4°8°12°16°20°

In practice: twenty minutes out of the fridge for a white, twenty minutes in it for a red. Both errors are the same size, and both are fixed by moving the bottle rather than by anything cleverer.

The 20 minute rule

Both common mistakes have the same fix, 20 minutes before you pour: put the red somewhere cooler and the white somewhere warmer. A heated house sits near 22 °C and the fridge near 4, and almost nothing wants to be served at either.