When you’re in a hurry and need to chill wine quickly, here’s a method that will speed up the wine chilling process to less than 5 minutes. All you need is an ice water bath and a zip lock bag.
Why limit yourself to only buying what’s available in the cooler at the store? Well, the one good reason is because you’ll have to be patient enough to wait 40 minutes while the wines chills in the freezer. But what if there’s no time at all? This is exactly what happened to me the other day:
- Hot day
- Dinner is on the table
- The wine is not cool enough, crap!
Enter the #ziplockmethod
How to chill wine quickly
In this test, we used a bottle of white wine (Rioja) that was approximately 70 °F (23 °C). We poured about half the contents of the bottle into a zip lock bag, closed it, and submerged it into an ice bath. After 6 minutes, the wine had been chilled to 36 °F (2.2 °C) at which point we transferred it directly into wine glasses.
Tips
- Chill the Bottle: If you plan to pour the wine back in the bottle, put the empty bottle in the freezer to chill it first
- Use a Decanter: Feel weird about serving wine out of a plastic bag (I would too!)? You can use a decanter instead.
- Work in a Restaurant?: Guests will likely not appreciate seeing this method in action as much as we do! Remove the bottle from the table and do your magic in the back-of-house.
- Increase Surface Area: This method works by increasing the surface area of the wine to ice-cold water. The larger the ice bath, the more wine you can chill quickly. Also, the less wine you pour in the bag, the faster it will chill.
A little science makes wine taste great!
Wine Storage Temperature Matters
Learn why it’s so important to store your wines in cool temperatures. Even reds!
Wine Storage Temperature Guide