Forgot to put the bottle in the fridge? Here’s the best way to chill wine in just five minutes.
You’ve put out the cheese platter, cleaned the toilet, and shoved your laundry under the bed, but you forgot to put the wine in the fridge and now the doorbell’s ringing. Don’t sweat it. There are ways to chill wine – fast. So, before your BFF has finished filling you in on their quietly quitting co-worker, your rosé will be ready.
Firstly, the goal temp of chilled wine? Somewhere around 7 to 13°C, depending on the style – a rough rule of thumb is the lighter the wine, the lower it ideally sits on that spectrum. Putting a bottle in the freezer horizontally will get you there in 60 minutes. Not bad, but we found a way to do it in just five if you’re willing to get a bit MacGyver.
Fill a metal ice bucket (Champagne bucket, bowl from your stand mixer, the sink – whatever you’ve got that’s big enough) with two kilos of ice, two cups of salt and enough water to reach the neck of the bottle. The water is important because it adds more points of contact between the cooling agent (the ice) and the bottle. Then, continually twist the bottle, spinning it in place and the temp will plummet. It will be 7°C in five minutes. Of course you can use less salt than the full two cups – adding any will still help, just tack on a bit of extra time.
The reason the spinning helps is that it pushes away the water that’s been warmed by the room-temperature bottle, bringing new, icy-cold water to the front. It also swirls the wine inside the bottle, letting the warmer liquid get closer to the glass. Science, baby. The same technique will work for soda, beer or spirits, too, if there’s more on the menu than wine.
If you can’t spin the bottle – maybe some entrees need your attention – it will still chill much faster sitting in a bucket of salted ice water than in the freezer, around 10 minutes.
If you don’t have any salt, which lowers the freezing point of the water, an ice bath alone will still certainly make a significant difference. It’ll take you 11 minutes to get it down to temp if you’re spinning the bottle, and 15 if you’re not.
If you don’t have that much ice, or a big enough bowl, but you have a freezer, it’s good to know the best way to use it. Here, simplicity is best. As mentioned, placing a bottle in the freezer on its side will get you chilled wine in around an hour. Standing it upright adds an extra 25 minutes to the process, so it’s worth rearranging the freezer to make space for it to lie down.
Contrary to popular myth, wrapping it in a damp cloth before putting it in the freezer doesn’t actually speed up the process (unless you’re working with a commercial blast chiller – how very MasterChef of you). Instead, it actually insulates the bottle and makes it take even longer, so skip that. There is a section of the internet that swears pouring the whole bottle into a plastic ziplock bag and putting it in the freezer will super-speed up the chill. However, the people who have tried it say, at best, it chills the wine in 50 minutes, only 10 minutes quicker than doing it in the bottle, and then you don’t have to serve your guests from a ziplock bag.
And for god’s sake, if you’re short on time, forget the fridge. You’ll be waiting at least two and a half hours for the wine to be anywhere near cold enough. You’d be better off heading to the bottle-o for a cold one instead.
