Hi Marty Richardson here from chefmartyrich.com. Welcome back to our daily tip series. Today, I want to finish up talking about wine.

Halloween Treat

It is almost dark here because it is Halloween night and I want to show you something. Did you carve your pumpkin? Pretty cool, huh? Hope you carved a pupmkin too. I stayed up way too late carving last night. I ended up eating all the candy, so I hope I don’t get any trick or treaters. Check out that writing, huh? It is the first time I tried that. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. Send me pictures of your jack o’lanterns and I will put them on the blog.

The Most Important Rule

The last thing I want to say about serving wine, and I have said it before, is, “Experiment with wine”. Try a glass of wine with different foods. Use your own research or the recommendations of friends or professionals. Ask the waitstaff when you go out to eat! Discover interesting combinations and trust your taste buds. That is the most important rule I would say.

What’s The Right Temperature?

Here are basic guidelines with regards to serving temperatures for different types of wine. White wines, rose and fruity reds should be served from between 40 to 50 degrees Farenheit. That means you need to keep them in the refrigerator most of the day. Hearty whites and light reds should be served from 50 to 60 degrees. That will require 2 or 3 hours in the refrigerator. And full bodied reds should be served between 60 and 66 degrees. A little more than an hour in the refrigerator should do. If you want to use your ice bucket, then pull the cork first, put the wine bottle in the bucket, fill with ice, and then add water. The ice water is going to chill the bottle down a lot quicker than putting the bottle in ice without the water.

Opening The Wine

I’m sure everybody knows how to take the cork out of the bottle. But let’s go through this anyway. Insert the corkscrew down the center of the cork as far as the corkscrew will go. Then pull out the cork. You are not supposed to make a big “popping” sound because you are shaking the wine bottle and the sediment is now floating all around inside. If you do split the cork and you can’t get the cork out, push the cork into the bottle, then decant the wine through a coffee filter and then pour the wine back into the bottle using a funnel. That is the easiest way that I know how to eliminate the bits of cork from the wine.

Wine Breathes

The wine needs to breathe. White wine needs to breathe only 5 to 10 minutes at the most. You can open it, pour and serve. A red wine, especially the hearty ones like the Bordeaux, Chianti, and the others that I talked about yesterday that are highly acidic, they need to be opened and let them breathe for 1 to 2 hours. “Breathing” mellows out the wine. It takes the edge off. I’m sure that if you have enjoyed red wine before, you know that the first glass or might have a little bite to it. But then by the end of the bottle, you are saying, “I really like this wine”. Well, it has probably mellowed out and improved the flavor. If you let it breathe in the beginning you will enjoy it more from the first glass. Wines that are a little lighter, like a Burgundy or Pinot Noir, need about a half an hour to an hour of breathing time. This is something that you might want to ask your wine merchant when you buy the wine.

Wine Glasses

First, don’t refrigerate your wine glasses. Second, the wine glass has a stem for a reason. You are supposed to hold the stem, so that you don’t heat the wine with your hand. Your hand is over 90 degrees and that is considerably warmer than the serving temperatures I just discussed. The “pinky erection” is optional. The wine glass holds a lot of liquid, but you are only supposed to fill the glass half full. The reason for that is that it lets the wine breathe. When you swirl it around, like everybody does, that releases the bouquet.

Storing Wine

The last thing I want to cover is that you store your wine bottles on the side, so that the wine keeps the cork soaked and expanded in the bottle neck, keeping the air out. If you store the bottle standing up and the cork dries out, it will shrink and then air can get in and it spoils your wine. If you have had the experience of opening a bottle of wine and it tastes like vinegar, then that is probably what happened. Also, when the bottles are lying on their side, you want to keep the labels facing up so that you don’t have to “spin the bottle”, in order to find out what kind of wine it is.

Okay. That’s it. We will probably have a recommendation or two for wines you can serve at Thanksgiving, but enough with the wine. Let’s move on to the food. Thanks for coming. Talk to you tomorrow.