Think about it.  You’ve bought a bottle of wine and are opening it to drink on its own or with a particular meal.  Whether expensive or not, the wine inside that bottle has an optimal serving temperature, just as the food you intend to eat along with it does.  Whatever the wine, a little attention to service temperature can go a long way, particularly in Singapore.



The French serve red wines 'a chambre' or ‘at room’ temperatures around 18 degrees Celsius.  At room temperatures of 18-20 degrees Celsius, red wines do okay.  But in tropical Singapore, where the room temperature can be as high as 30 degrees Celsius, any wine warms up well beyond the optimal temperature, and fast.  In our equatorial climate red wine served warm will quite often taste alcoholic, heavy, excessively tannic and unpalatable.

Similarly if sweet dessert wines are served too warm they become cloying and sticky on the palate.  No doubt, the answer is to chill the wine…but not too much!  Over chilling certain white wines causes them to lose their vibrancy and masks their flavour, especially more expensive, mature and complex white wines.  The same can go for certain reds.

So how can a wine consumer achieve the ideal temperatures to drink a wine without much fuss?  It’s actually very easy.

For red wines, simply place your red wines in the refrigerator for 30 minutes prior to serving.  This will bring the wine to a palatable temperature and you will enjoy most all of the bottle at an optimum temperature.

For white wines, allow two hours in the refrigerator to bring the temperatures down sufficiently.  Alternatively, fill a bucket with ice and water and chill the wine for 30 minutes.  Another tip is that inexpensive, young white wines often taste better when they are served very cold, so chill away!

For sparkling wines and sweet dessert wines, even if the wine has spent the night in the fridge, it is essential to chill the wine for an hour in an ice bucket prior to drinking. Domestic refrigerators keep temperatures at around 7C so these wines will drink at their best with some added time on ice.




Here are suggestions on what temperatures to serve your wines in Singapore.  If you want to go the wine-geek route (it never hurts…)  buy a wine thermometer to make certain every drop you drink is at its best. Ed Soon 26/01/09