To err is to human, and to forget to chill the wine ahead of time is a more common experience than you think. The old “rules” might advise serving red wine at room temperature, but on a balmy evening, we can guarantee no one wants a balmy glass of wine. If you planned ahead, you could have stuck the bottles in the refrigerator for a gradual cool (here’s how long to chill wine in the fridge for the best results), but now it’s 7 p.m. and the guests are chanting for a round of merlot. Luckily, it’s alright to pop that bottle in the freezer for a quick chill, but the timing needs to be fairly precise.
Ideally, you should chill a bottle of wine for about 30 minutes , but the timing depends on the kind of wine you’ve placed in the freezer. Thanks to those tannins in a bottle of red wine, your merlot should stay in the freezer for about 40 minutes to reach that perfect temperature. Meanwhile, lighter white wines can stay in the freezer a little longer, up to about an hour. The most important thing when quickly freezing a bottle of wine is to set a timer and keep your eye on the bottle. You can always put it back for longer, but frozen liquid isn’t the only disaster you’ll have to worry about if you forget.
Leaving wine in the freezer for too long could be cataclysmic
The liquid in your bottle can freeze if left in extremely cold temperatures for too long, somewhere in the 16-22 degrees Fahrenheit range, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your wine is ruined. Your wine has water in it, and when water freezes, it expands. With nowhere else to go, the pressure of the expanded water molecules in that lovely bottle of chardonnay (the most popular kind of white wine) might cause the glass to crack or shatter. There’s also the risk that the pressure will shove the cork out of the bottle, starting an unintentional oxidation process that could ultimately ruin the entire thing.
There are safer, more effective ways of quick-chilling a bottle of wine in the freezer than others. There’s the wet paper towel method, which involves wrapping a moist paper towel around the bottle before popping it in the freezer for a shorter time. Some sommeliers will recommend skipping the freezer altogether in favor of an ice bucket bath, where you fill a small bucket with about half water, half ice, and an egregious amount of table salt. This also happens to be Ina Garten’s preferred method for cooling wine in a flash. Whichever way you chill the wine, just remember to take it out at some point or risk accidentally dyeing your freezer walls red!
