It’s easy to see why the chilled-red army has so many volunteers. Quality options abound at an array of prices, and you can drink them on their own or paired with just about anything, including cheese boards, swordfish and Thai curries. The style also provides a common ground when you’re with a group where some prefer red, and others white or rosé.
But choosing the right reds to chill is tricky. Certain styles taste bright and juicy when they’re cold, and others become muted, metallic or otherwise unpleasant if you leave them in the fridge too long.
That’s why understanding the differences between chillable and “regular” reds is key. Here’s how to approach the cooler with confidence.
Which red wines should be chilled?
The reckless among us might say that any bottle is chillable so long as you have a functioning refrigerator, but that ignores the immense variabilities of a category as broad as red wine. Generally, the best red wines to serve cold are young and light-bodied, with bright fruit flavours and low tannins.
There isn’t one grape that invariably meets all these criteria, however. Instead, look for regions and key terminology to identify which reds are suited to the ice bucket.
One place to start is in Beaujolais, a region of France known for reds made from its signature grape, gamay. Many of these wines are fermented in stainless steel or cement rather than oak, which puts flavours such as juicy raspberries and cherries front and centre. They’re often intended to be enjoyed soon after bottling, because fruity notes can fall back as wines age.
Elsewhere in Europe, France’s Loire Valley has several grape varieties that make great chilled reds. “In the Loire, grolleau, pineau d’aunis, and even some cab franc do really well with a chill,” says Nasiri. She’s similarly fond of Italian varieties like schiava from Alto Adige as well as Sicilian frappato.
Or try grenache from the Central Coast of California, Australia’s McLaren Vale or parts of France’s Rhône Valley. “You can chill it, and it shows this elegance,” says Nikita Malhotra, head sommelier of the wine festival La Paulée and a partner at Smithereens restaurant in New York City.
Which red wines should not be chilled?
Serving temperature has an enormous impact on how wine tastes and behaves in your glass. Typically, sommeliers serve light-bodied white wines and rosés at roughly 7 to to 12C amplify freshness. “You’re trying to get at all those fruit notes,” explains Malhotra.
Wine professionals usually pour full-bodied reds such as cabernet and zinfandel in the 12 to 18C range. These wines often have higher alcohol levels and more discernible tannins, and a slightly higher temperature helps keep all those components in harmony.
If you serve these big, hearty wines in the 4 to 7C range used for chilled reds, you risk flattening their complexity. Low temperatures can tighten tannins and create a vaguely tinny impression – “nothing you’d want from a wine,” Malhotra says. “It’s important not to get overly excited about chilling all your reds.”
What makes a red wine chillable?
Certain winemaking techniques reliably produce light reds with zippy flavours, too – for example, blending red and white grapes, or using carbonic maceration. The latter entails starting fermentation within each individual grape, rather than after the clusters are crushed and the juice is exposed to the tannic skins. Nicknamed carbo, “it’s a good shorthand for wines that are going to be more fruit-forward and a bit lower tannin, which will all lend itself to a nice chill,” says Meri Lugo, the managing partner of Domestique, a natural and low-intervention wine store near Bloomingdale in Washington, DC.
Last year, when the Domestique team redesigned their website, they added a section devoted to chillable reds to meet rising consumer demand. In the brick-and-mortar store, people ask staffers about reds to chill “a couple of times a day,” Lugo says. While low-intervention winemaking is certainly not the only way to produce reds that taste great cold, the Venn diagram of people who love natural wine and are interested in chilled reds is nearly a circle. It comes back to the playfulness and approachability of serving a red wine ice-cold, Lugo says.
But enthusiasm for this style isn’t a fleeting trend. Lugo links it to the ways that generations of winery workers shared cold glasses of the light, fruity first presses of each vintage during harvest. “Those ‘farmer wines’ have a lot of the same characteristics as chillable reds,” she says.
“All new things are old. They all have their place in history.”
Whether you choose to contemplate global agricultural heritage while sipping an ice-cold carbo grenache is up to you, of course. But few things are cooler than the ways that wine connects us to far-flung people and places.
