Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [22]
Why do we drink white burgundy too cold?
LET’S SAY that you’ve decided to have a roast chicken for dinner, but you’re not in the mood for a good claret; you settle on a nice white burgundy or California chardonnay instead. A few minutes before you take the chicken out of the oven, you take the burgundy out of the fridge. It is delicious, and goes very well with the chicken. After dinner, you cork the bottle and leave it on the table, intending to return it to the fridge before going to bed. However, at that point, you decide to pour yourself another glass. To your delight, it is even better: as it has warmed up, it has developed, and aromas and flavors you had failed to notice before now suffuse your nose and mouth.
Most people drink white burgundy too cold because they probably haven’t noted the advice of the great and good wine experts, and even if they have, it’s just as difficult in a modern environment to avoid drinking white burgundy too cold as to avoid drinking red wine too hot. The British wine writers Oz Clarke, Hugh Johnson, and Jancis Robinson all agree that a complex wine such as a white burgundy should be drunk much warmer than other white wines. Johnson’s recommendation is 57 to 59°F, actually a little warmer than his recommendation for “standard daily reds.”
Most people don’t have cellars, so they tend to keep white wines in the refrigerator. For most whites the temperature of the refrigerator (44°F) is closer to the best drinking temperature than is the temperature of the house—but for white burgundy or most reds, neither the refrigerator nor the house is much good. The temperature of a modern house is probably 70°F in the winter, thanks to central heating, and hotter in the kitchen and in the summer. If the house is indeed at 70°F and the refrigerator at 44°F, then keep the burgundy in the refrigerator, taking it out and leaving it out in the house for about one hour and forty-five minutes before drinking it; alternatively, leave it in the house and put it in the refrigerator for the same amount of time. Either way, the wine will have got to about 57°F. And in a restaurant, don’t leave the white burgundy in the ice bucket for too long.
Alas, getting the temperature right won’t help if the white burgundy is oxidized. But if it is in good condition and also served at the right temperature, bliss.
What does the Six-Day War have to do with wine?
WHAT A CAPRICIOUS lot we are; how quickly fashions change. A little over a hundred years after Cicero’s comment suggesting that old wines tend to go sour, along comes the Gospel of Luke, declaring (in chapter 5, verse 39) that “no man having drunk old wine immediately desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.”
Of course, we don’t know what the author of Luke meant by “old” and “new” wine. What we do know is that viticulture was known in Palestine, Judea, or Israel (or whatever the land was called at any particular time) at least a thousand, and possibly two thousand, years before Luke: the Book of Deuteronomy (chapter 8, verse 8) specifically praises the vine, and the Song of Solomon begins with an erotic linking of love and wine: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” And Noah got drunk on wine, which led to a lot of trouble.
But in modern times, the wines of Israel have had—at least from the wine lover’s point of view—a patchy time of it, not least because of the Jewish dietary laws. The principles of kashrut, which set out which foods are forbidden because they are “unclean” (the rules derive mainly from the Book of Leviticus and serve as the laws of the Temple