How to serve wine, as it was meant to be

by Patrick Mur • 5 min read

A wine is finished long before you open it — grown, made, aged and shipped by people who cared about every step. Then it reaches you, and the last part is yours.

Serving is the most overlooked stage in a wine's life, and the only one entirely in your hands. Get it right and a good bottle shows everything it has; get it wrong and years of work go quietly to waste in the final thirty seconds. This is the whole journey — temperature, timing, the pour, the glass — so that what reaches your glass is the wine as its maker intended.

Nothing added. Nothing taken away. Just the right conditions.

Start with temperature

If you change one thing, change this. Temperature governs how a wine releases its aroma and how its fruit, acidity, tannin and alcohol balance on the palate. Too warm and a red turns soft and alcoholic; too cold and a white tastes of almost nothing. The right window is cooler — and narrower — than most people serve within, and “room temperature” hasn't been accurate since the days of cold stone cellars.

→ The complete guide to wine serving temperature — the right window for every style, in °C and °F, and how to hit it.