Tom Firth
Tom Firth is a writer, wine consultant, judge and a member of the Wine Access National Tasting Panel. He loves to chat about all things wine and blogs for wineaccess.ca, tweets as @cowtownwine and is a general nuisance.
How to quickly chill a bottle of wine
An experiment in chilling wine — in the toilet
Rarely a week goes by without someone asking me about a newfangled “miracle” wine device and if it works.
Most recently someone asked me about a bottle-top wine chiller. This device is used to chill a room temperature bottle by the glass. I suggested to my colleague that there is a cheaper, better way to chill a bottle of wine. And no, this solution doesn’t depend on your significant other refilling the ice tray.
Try the toilet tank.
In a pinch, the toilet tank is filled with clean, potable, ice cold water, and in most cases, has just enough room for a bottle of wine or two. Even with less than 20 minutes to spare, most bottles will get nice and cold.
To test this theory for my skeptical colleagues, I took a bottle of pinot gris from my cellar and let it warm up to room temperature (roughly 21 degrees Celsius) in my kitchen before placing it in the toilet tank. I used a special bottle thermometer that measures the temperature of the fluid in the bottle, rather than the glass, and timed how long it took the bottle to chill in the toilet. (The water in my toilet tank was about 10 degrees Celsius.)
The wine cooled to 18 degrees Celsius fairly quickly, and 8 minutes later, the wine was just over 15 degrees Celsius. My wine reached a healthy drinking temperature, 13 degrees Celsius, after 18 minutes in the tank.
I flushed once in the name of science to refill the tank with fresh cool water to see if I could get the wine any cooler. After roughly 20 minutes the wine plateaued around 12 degrees Celsius. At this point we decided “To Hell with this!” and enjoyed a glass of toilet-chilled wine.
I expect my results would have been a little better if we hadn’t opened the wine for the experiment. The thermometer required the bottle to be open and this meant that the top 5 inches of the bottle stayed out of the water and away from the cooling effect.
Although chilling a bottle of wine in the toilet may not be the most glamorous choice, it works in a pinch. Your guests won’t even know.
Of course, as I write this, it’s freezing cold and the great outdoors has plenty of room to chill wine on your deck or patio. Just don’t forget it overnight!
Photo: Michael Hansen
Comments
Brian
Another quick way is to add ice, salt and water to an ice bucket to chill wine down.
This works faster than a freezer because the water is in contact with the bottle. It also works better than just ice in the bucket alone because water creates more surface area against the glass than just ice alone. The more surface area, in contact, the faster the cooling.
Adding salt to the water makes ice water colder because it lowers the freezing point of the water and the ice melts faster.
cono_sur
That's ok. I'd rather use the freezer...
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