How to Serve Wine

Video Transcript

"Now, maybe you're having your wine as an easy drinking wine, or you're having your wine for dinner. If it's an easy drinking wine, usually there is very little formality. The most important thing about wine is you must serve it at the right temperature. Otherwise its characteristics will change. If you were serving a good red wine too cold, it will feel very tonic, and maybe the acidity will stand out more. With a white wine, if you serve the white wine Sauvignon or Chardonnay too warm, it will feel so-called flabby, sort of rounded and creamy and just unappetizing. So it's very important to serve your wine at the right temperature. With white wines, there's a range of temperatures at which you serve them. Crisp Sauvignons and light wines can afford the cooler temperature, and rich creamy Chardonnays should be served at a slightly warmer temperature than ice cold. So I would say as a guideline something like a Riesling or a very fresh Sauvignon, you could serve at about six to nine degrees centigrade. A Chardonnay or a more expressive wine, the wine that needs to be more aromatic, you could serve between, let's say nine and even up to sixteen degrees centigrade in some Chardonnays. A good Burgundy is better off at about twelve to fourteen degrees centigrade. So try and find out what the right temperature for your wine ought to be. The merchant you're buying from should know. So that's about serving wines at the right temperature. Now, what - to serve wine, if you've got a young wine, for example Australian Shiraz screw cap, straightaway you can pour it into the bottle, into the glass. Your choice of glass depends on again your occasion and how you want to enjoy the wine. If it's a simple drinking wine and you just want to have - to match that with a simple pasta, a simple glass like that will do. The best thing about serving wine is wine again is about aroma so let's always focus on getting the most of that to your nose, to enjoy the dimension of wine that offers. So don't fill your glass up to the top because you really don't have anywhere for the aromas to be captured so that you can enjoy that aspect. Weight is a bigger glass, clearly that's a glass that could contain two thirds of the bottle, so here you really just want to serve up to about one-fifth to a quarter of the glass, for a big glass. Now why do they make glasses that big if all you want to do is just serve to there? The reason is that as the wine evaporates the aromas can sit at the top here and as you drink, your nose goes into the glass and the aromas just float around the glass, your nose, as well as the wine going into your mouth. So you get the best of both worlds, your sensory areas are hit at the same time. So I'll actually serve some wine now. With a simple red wine, here's a simple red wine, it's a Rioja as it happens, already opened, normally I would tend to serve half a glass for myself in this. That's just about right. It would give - you can always add later or refill your glass. It does give some room for the aroma to sit. So when you're drinking it, the first thing the aroma comes to your nose and then you drink. Something this size, in this case I'm going to use a nice white wine. You may find that it's always in restaurants, the white wine glass has a tendency to be smaller than the white - than the red wine glass, so if you're serving at a dinner table you do want to have a small differentiation as with the red wine. And here, the white wine in a big glass, so what you want to do is to serve really small quantity like that, it's actually coming up to the glass or maybe a bit more. So that's probably a standard glass. It's sitting at the bottom of the glass, the aromas will evolve into this space, and again when you drink your nose goes into the glass, you pick up the aroma and the flavor of the wine on the palette at the same time. What should be said is that eighty percent of taste is in the nose, hence, these glasses work particularly well with really fine wine because it's all about that aroma. So these are two ways of serving wine. Always, never over serve your wine, give your guests for example, the ability to say no and also don't fill the glass up, so that's how you serve wine, the preparation before, the right temperature, and then the gentle pouring into the glass."