Are you doing it wrong, like me?

by Patrick Mur • 3 min read

The twenty minutes before you pour — and why I stopped skipping them.

You know the moment — you've picked the bottle, you're hungry, the glasses are out, and the last thing you want to do is wait. So you don't. You pour. And the wine's fine. It's just… not what it could be.

Here's what I've learned, mostly by getting it wrong for years: the twenty minutes before you pour matter more than almost anything else you'll do with that bottle.

It's not complicated. White comes out of the fridge. Red goes in. Then you leave it alone.

That's the whole ritual. But something happens in that gap. The white loses its fridge-chill and finally starts to smell of something. The red comes down out of the heat of the room — because your living room, whatever the old books say, is too warm for it — and it stops tasting of alcohol and starts tasting of wine. There's a right temperature for every wine, and I eventually wrote it all down — but for the twenty-minute version, you don't need the numbers. You just need to start.

I don't time it to the minute. I've done it enough now that I can just feel when a bottle's ready. And honestly? I've come to like the waiting. It slows everything down. It's the moment the evening actually begins — the line between the day I've had and the meal I'm about to sit down to. By the time the wine's ready, so am I.

So next time you open something you care about, don't pour it straight away. Give it its twenty minutes. Go do something else. Come back.

I think you'll start looking forward to them, the way I do.