Wine temperature: storing it and serving it
Barello is a home cellar and bar app that tells you what to open tonight, what to keep, and what you can mix from what you have. The short answer: store every wine at about 55°F (13°C), and serve it at the temperature its style suits, from 43°F (6°C) for sparkling to 64°F (18°C) for a full red.
The one-screen answer
| Wine | Temperature |
|---|---|
| Storing Any wine: the cellar baseline every drinking window assumes | 55°F (13°C) |
| Sparkling Sparkling wine: well chilled | 43 to 50°F (6 to 10°C) |
| Sweet wine Sweet wine: well chilled | 43 to 45°F (6 to 8°C) |
| Light white Light and medium-bodied white: chilled, like Pinot Grigio | 45 to 50°F (7 to 10°C) |
| Oaked white Medium and full-bodied, oaked white: lightly chilled, like oaked Chardonnay | 50 to 55°F (10 to 13°C) |
| Light red Light-bodied red: lightly chilled | 55°F (13°C) |
| Full red Medium and full-bodied red: room temperature | 59 to 64°F (15 to 18°C) |
| Freezes A typical red, by the University of Illinois | about 22°F (−6°C) |
Serving rows from WSET's serving chart; the storage row from Barello's model; the freezing row from the University of Illinois.
Storage and serving are different questions
Storage is about how fast a wine ages, and every wine wants the same steady 55°F (13°C) for that. Serving is about how it tastes in the glass tonight, and that changes with the style. A red stored at 55°F (13°C) and served straight from the fridge is a few degrees cold, which is why the two numbers differ.
What your house does to a bottle
A bottle ages at the rate its temperature sets, not at the rate the vintage chart says. Barello's model is the physical one: every 18°F (10°C) above 55°F (13°C) roughly doubles the rate, and at 77°F (25°C) or more you are not ageing it, you are cooking it. Pick where you live and where the bottle actually sits.
Choose a city and a spot, and this line will tell you how much faster the bottle is ageing than it would in a cellar.
This is the same model that dates every bottle in Barello. Open the app to run it against your own wine. Or read how to store wine without a cellar.
What heat actually does
Wine ages through slow chemical reactions, and like most reactions they speed up as it gets warmer: roughly doubling with every 18°F (10°C) above the 55°F (13°C) a cellar keeps. At 77°F (25°C) or more the wine stops ageing and starts to spoil, and no drinking window means anything after that.
Take a garage. In London one runs at about 73°F (23°C) once the swing between day and night is counted, so a bottle there ages 2.0 times as fast as in a wine fridge. In Madrid the same garage reaches about 84°F (29°C), past the line, and the wine is spoiling rather than ageing. A wine fridge is 55°F (13°C) in both.
Cold short of freezing slows those reactions, but Barello never counts it as a bonus: a bottle in a cold spot ages at cellar pace and no slower, because published dates already assume good storage. Freezing is a different risk: it can push the cork out or crack the bottle.
Too cold, too warm
Below 43°F (6°C) the cold masks the flavour of whites, rosé and sparkling, and above 64°F (18°C) a red starts to lose its freshness. Rosé is served chilled like a white; WSET gives no separate figure for it, or for fortified wine, so neither do we. The serving figures in the table above are conventions, not Barello's model: Barello's numbers are the storage half.
Getting a bottle to temperature
To chill a bottle fast, use an ice bucket three-quarters full of equal parts ice and water, so the bottle sits in iced water: ice on its own leaves air around the bottle, and air insulates. To warm a red that's too cold, hold the bowl of the glass in your hands. Never put it by a heater: sudden heat can damage the wine for good. Both tips are WSET's.
More by colour: red wine serving temperature, white, rosé and sparkling, the wine fridge setting and when wine freezes. For where to keep it, see how to store wine without a cellar.
Questions people ask
Is 55°F (13°C) the right temperature to store wine?
It's the middle of the range. The Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) puts long-term storage at 50 to 59°F (10 to 15°C), and every published drinking window assumes a cellar at about 55°F (13°C), which is the baseline Barello's model measures everything against.
Does a wine fridge need to be humid?
It needs to not dry the air out, which is the trouble with a kitchen fridge. A kitchen fridge runs at about 39°F (4°C) and dehumidifies, which is hard on corks; WSET says corks kept in a fridge too long lose their elasticity. For keeping, a wine fridge at 55°F (13°C) is the place.
What if I don't have a wine fridge?
Use the coolest steady spot in the house, usually an inside cupboard. In London a cupboard sits at about 59°F (15°C) and ages wine 1.1 times as fast as a cellar. The calculator above does the same sum for your town.
Can I store wine in the kitchen?
Not for long. WSET calls the kitchen one of the worst places to keep wine, because its temperature swings so much, and a spot that swings is harder on wine than a steady one.