By David Rosengarten
From The Real-World Wine Guide, courtesy of foodnetwork.com.

We all know that white wine is served cold and red wine at room temperature, but there are many subtleties to serving wine.

Temperature
If your purpose in serving white wine is only to provide refreshment for food on a hot day, then by all means serve your white wine super-cold (a few hours in a chilly box or 30 minutes in the freezer). Extreme cold kills subtlety, so no need to choose a wine that's much beyond wet. If you want to taste more of the white wine, serve it cool, but not icy cold.

Some wine-lovers serve their best whites—like aged, subtle white Burgundies—fairly warm, at a temperature not much below room temperature. This gives you maximum perception of the wine's charms. It doesn't, however, supply the conventional refreshment of white wine.

Red, of course, is another story. Too cold, and a lot of the flavor and aroma is suppressed. Too warm, say, 75 degrees, and the wine's alcohol is unpleasantly dominant. Even at 68 degrees, or room temperature, red wine is a little warm—for when the old Europeans said room temperature, they meant their chilly rooms of about 60 to 65 degrees.

Most reds are best when they are basically room temperature but the slightest bit cool. An exception is fruity, young and simple red, like Beaujolais, which benefits from a little chill (this knocks down the excessive fruit a bit). Give these 15 minutes in the fridge.

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