Guests arriving in twenty minutes and warm bottles in the cupboard is a recurring domestic situation. There are considerably faster methods than the refrigerator, and they rely on straightforward physics.
Why Ice Water Beats a Freezer
A freezer is very cold and full of air, and air conducts heat poorly. A bottle in a freezer is surrounded by an insulating layer, which is why it takes so long.
Water conducts heat far better. A bottle submerged in ice water cools dramatically faster than the same bottle in a freezer, and adding salt to the water lowers its freezing point below zero, making the bath colder still.
Ice, water and a generous handful of salt will take a bottle from room temperature to properly chilled in roughly fifteen minutes. An insulated bucket, of the kind catalogued by oggi, then keeps it there rather than requiring constant topping up.
The Method
- Fill a bucket or basin with ice and cold water, roughly half and half
- Add a good handful of salt and stir
- Submerge the bottle fully rather than standing it in a shallow bath
- Turn it occasionally, which moves the cooled water away from the surface
- Check after ten to fifteen minutes rather than leaving it indefinitely
Water Level Matters
The most common error is a bucket of ice with an inch of water at the bottom. Only the submerged part cools quickly, and the neck of the bottle stays warm.
Ice alone is considerably slower than ice and water together, which is counter-intuitive and is the single most useful thing to know about chilling drinks.
Serving Temperatures
Colder is not automatically better. Over-chilling suppresses aroma and flavour, which is why a wine straight from a very cold refrigerator tastes of very little for the first ten minutes.
Broadly: sparkling and light whites are served coldest, fuller whites slightly less cold, lighter reds slightly cool, and full reds at cool room temperature rather than actual room temperature, which in a heated house is considerably warmer than the convention assumes.
Keeping Drinks Cold at a Gathering
A bottle taken out of a refrigerator warms surprisingly fast in a warm room. Keeping it in ice and water rather than on a table is what maintains the temperature across an evening.
For a party, a bucket for the bottle currently in use and a larger container for the rest works better than trying to keep everything in the refrigerator, which cannot hold enough and gets opened constantly.
The Freezer Shortcut
Twenty minutes in a freezer chills a bottle noticeably and is a reasonable emergency measure. The important part is setting a timer.
Bottles forgotten in a freezer freeze, expand and burst, which with sparkling wine in particular is genuinely dangerous as well as messy. This happens to almost everyone once.
Ice Quality
Large dense cubes melt more slowly and dilute less, which matters for anything served over ice. Small wet cubes from a domestic tray are the most common cause of a watery drink.
Ice also absorbs freezer odours readily. Ice made a month ago in an open tray tastes of whatever else is in the freezer, which is worth knowing before blaming the drink.
