Is it better to keep a bottle of red wine in the fridge or in a hot apartment?
Hello there! I'm Dr. Vinifera, but you can call me Vinny. Ask me your toughest wine questions, from the fine points of etiquette to the science of winemaking. And don't worry, I'm no wine snob—you can also ask me those "dumb questions" you're too embarrased to ask your wine geek friends! I hope you find my answers educational, empowering and even amusing. And don't forget to check out my most asked questions and my full archives for all my Q&A classics.
Dear Dr. Vinny,
When we go away for a month in the summer, I normally leave one bottle of white wine and one bottle of red to drink when we return. The apartment is not air conditioned when we are gone. Am I better off leaving the red in the refrigerator with the white or out in the 85° heat?
—Meredith, New York, N.Y.
Dear Meredith,
What a lovely tradition to come home to! I normally don’t recommend storing your wine in a food refrigerator for very long—kitchen fridges are too cold and too dry compared to ideal wine storage conditions. But in the short term, I think it’s just fine to keep a bottle of red in the fridge along with your bottle of white. I usually put some bottles in the fridge when I have company coming, and there’s almost always a bottle of bubbly ready to go (because I’m almost always in the mood for bubbly!). So I think it’s perfectly OK to store your post-trip wines in the refrigerator—it’s definitely better than leaving them out in the apartment, where your wine would be at serious risk of becoming heat damaged or “cooked.”
Just keep in mind that you won’t want to drink the wines straight out of the refrigerator—they’ll be so cold that even the white will probably seem muted. I’d recommend taking them out of the fridge as soon as you get home and letting them warm up to ideal serving temperature before pouring yourself a glass. Enjoy!
—Dr. Vinny
