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By Root 450 0

of oxygen that pass through the cork during storage. You can usually tell just by looking that the wine is oxidized, because over the years the color darkens from a light yellow to a much darker shade, continues to amber, and ends up brown. You can also tell by sniffing it, because it often has the aroma of madeira—hence the alternative term maderized. It does not, however, taste like madeira; it tastes foul.

White burgundies from the 1995 to 1999 vintages became notorious for not keeping and improving as their purchasers had expected. On being opened in the early 2000s, when they should have been drinking well, they were found to be maderized. A particularly plausible explanation is that not enough sulfur dioxide had been put into the wine at bottling. Winemakers try to protect the flavor of the wine by adding a small amount of sulfur dioxide, recognizable by the acrid smell of burning matches. In the early 1990s, however, critics complained that the smell of sulfur dioxide was too strong, and consequently many winemakers in Burgundy cut back on the amounts they used. Whether or not this is the correct explanation (there are other theories), such was the dismay and outrage—for these were expensive wines—that Web sites were set up to exchange horror stories. Whatever the causes, huge numbers of bottles were found to be maderized, and whole cases of wine were poured down the sink.

Why do we drink red wine too hot?

YOU ARE TIRED and hungry after a long, hot, sunny day, and you have decided to go to your local Italian restaurant for some comfort food, such as lasagne or ravioli. In spite of the open windows, the restaurant is hot from all of the people and the continual cooking. You order some of the restaurant’s decent and reasonably priced red wine to go with their excellent food. The bottle is opened, but the wine is warm, and it tastes rather limp. You boldly ask the waiter for a bucket of water and ice, and partially submerge the bottle in it. After ten minutes, you find that the wine has cooled nicely and now tastes as you expected.

Hugh Johnson, in the inside cover of his annual Pocket Wine Book, has a chart of recommended drinking temperatures. The range for red wines is from 11°C for Beaujolais (for an approximate Fahrenheit equivalent double the centigrade and add 30, so 11°C is 52°F) to 64°F for the best red Bordeaux and other top reds. For “standard daily reds,” he recommends 55–57°F. The Italian restaurant stores the wine on shelves that can be seen by the diners, and thus your bottle has reached a temperature of, say, 81°F: the wisdom of the ice bucket is confirmed.

Go back a hundred years and imagine that it is wintertime. Some wine-drinking gentlefolk have the butler bring up a bottle of their best claret from the cellar, which has a temperature of about 50°F. They may be well off, but keeping their high-ceilinged dining room much above 64°F is well nigh impossible. Consequently, they have the bottle opened and left in the dining room for several hours to allow it to warm to the right temperature. In the summer, when the dining room is rather warmer and the cellar may be at 59°F, they will not have to wait as long before the wine is at the perfect temperature—that is, winter room temperature—to be best appreciated.

Nowadays, most wine drinkers lack both cellar and servant, but they do have central heating. Winter or summer, if they leave the wine around the house or, worst of all, just keep it in the kitchen, they will regularly be drinking red wine at a temperature that unbalances the flavors. The idea that wine ought to be drunk at room temperature or chambré is no longer a good one. Room temperature has outpaced the traditional advice, and too many wine drinkers fail to store the wine in a cool environment in the first place.

So, in the absence of any cool storage for your red wine, you need to do the opposite of what the gentlefolk of 1908 did, which is to cool it. If you haven’t got any ice handy, you can use the refrigerator: it is not as fast as the bucket of water and ice, but it works.