We’ve all done it. Friends drop in unexpectedly and you have no fizz or white wine to hand in the fridge. Or you just want to quickly cool down a light red to serve at your summer barbecue.
You pop a bottle in the freezer, assure yourself you’ll remember about it, and then go back to your guests, find something else to quench your thirst and get caught up on conversation or hosting duties.
And later that evening or the next day, when you go to get an icecube for your cocktail or to defrost the sausages, you discover a frozen wine slushie.
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What’s the best advice?
It might seems that the best advice is to never put a bottle of wine in the freezer. But, in fact, so long as you remember it’s there, a freezer is one of many handy methods to quickly chill down your wine (see below for others).
Matt Walls, Decanter‘s Rhône correspondent, recommends putting your wine in the freezer for 22 minutes for lightly chilled, and 28 minutes for fully chilled.
Master Sommelier and restaurateur Xavier Rousset MS shared a top tip for speeding it up further: ‘Wrap the bottle in a wet cloth then put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes.’
The most important thing is not to forget about it. Set a timer on your phone or watch so you don’t leave the bottle in there.
Can you put sparkling wine in the freezer?
You can put your sparkling wine, such as Champagne, Prosecco, Cava or Crémant in the freezer. But it’s even more important not to forget about it.
Sparkling wines are more risky, and liable to explode (or at the very least push the cork out) if left in the freezer for too long, due to pressure created by the carbon dioxide, which gives them their bubbles.
That’s why it is probably best to give them a bit less time – a quick 20 minutes in the freezer can help to chill your bottle of Champagne.
When wine in the freezer is forgotten
Members of the Decanter team have all had their own disasters after putting wine in a freezer.
‘I put a bottle of Champagne, that was an engagement present, in the freezer hoping to drink it that evening,’ said James Button, Decanter’s Regional Editor for Italy. ‘Alas, opened the freezer door about three hours later to discover the neck had parted ways with the body.’
The same thing occurred with a colleague’s birthday present bottle of Laurent-Perrier rosé, which ‘shattered into a million pieces and turned the freezer pink’.
And it’s not just sparkling wines that have potential to burst in the freezer. A 1997 Frédéric Emile Riesling from Alsace house Trimbach became ‘a Riesling and glass ice lolly’ for another unfortunate Decanter staffer.
The fastest way to chill a bottle
You might think freezers have the advantage of speed, but in fact an ice bath is actually a more effective method for quickly cooling down a bottle of wine – in just half the time, in fact.
The key advice is that you shouldn’t just fill a whole container with ice cubes and expect to chill wine in record time. If you use roughly 50% ice and 50% cold water then the chilling process will happen more quickly. The water will help to transfer heat from the bottle.
‘Use plenty of ice cubes (ideally crushed ice) in a bucket with some cold water and lots of salt – yes, salt,’ said Rousset. The salt melts the ice so the water will be cooler faster; salty water also cools faster than pure water.
‘Make sure the bottle is submerged to the top to be more efficient,’ adds Rousset. ‘Your wine should be cool in about 15 minutes.’
Other ways to chill wine
There other ways to keep your wine cool, but these are more effective if the bottle has already been chilled:
- Ice sleeves are great to keep an already chilled bottle at a cool temperature. It’s worth always having a few in your freezer, ready to go.
- There are icicle-shaped gadgets you can pop in the neck of your bottle which cools the wine as you pour, though these can be messy.
- An easy solution is to keep some grapes frozen in your freezer, and pop these in your glass, says Peter Richards MW. They’ll work like ice cubes in wine, but without diluting the wine.
Originally published in 2017 and updated in May 2024.
