In Cuba, the pleasure of good wine is all in the temperature
From the bath, I have a view of the treetops and as much hot water as I choose to run. The bedroom is air-conditioned. The bar by the swimming pool sells chilled beer in bottles glistening with condensation. Just inside the sticky heat of the dining room - no air-con - is a rack with the hotel's slender but reasonable selection of wines, from Meursault to Sancerre. If I didn't know better, I'd be looking forward to a refreshing glass of it in the evening.
"Oriel," I say to the hotel's PR manager, a man who spends much of his time sitting on a bench in reception smiling and telling guests that, for the duration of their stay, they must think of him as their helper. "Oriel, please, please, don't keep your wine there. Please. I know you probably don't drink wine, but if you are going to stock it for your guests, please keep it somewhere cool, or it will be ruined."
I pause. "This is very important."
Oriel smiles chirpily and nods. He isn't listening to a word I'm saying. I may as well be speaking Mandarin, or using semaphore flags. I'm feeling very torn here. This is Cuba: the locals have ration books for rice and milk. The farmers still use oxen to drag their ploughs through the fields. How selfish, blinkered and downright unreasonable is it to complain about the condition of the wine?
"Oriel, if you don't take your wine out of the blazing heat, where it will get so cooked that it will start to taste of sherry, I am going to hang you upside down from one of those trees and have you flayed." All right, so I didn't say that. But I wanted to. Not because I cared about drinking it myself, but because someone had gone to the trouble of shipping those bottles across the Atlantic, and to keep wine in that way is a crime against alcohol.
The first wine we had over here was to go with a lobster lunch. I couldn't believe my luck when I saw Marques de Caceres, a favourite rose, on the list. But when it came, and I saw that its usually blowsy deep-raspberry colour had deteriorated to a pale rusty salmon, I realised it was going to taste horrible. And indeed it did. As does all the wine in Cuba, because wine should be stored at 13 C, not left to cook in tropical heat.
But Cuba isn't the only place where crimes are committed against wine. Back home, my first glass (shell-pink Provencal rose) tastes utterly perfect - for the first few sips. Then I begin to think: isn't this a bit over-chilled?
In Britain, we don't keep wine so badly that it actually degenerates, but we do have an unfortunate habit of over-chilling, a legacy from the days when the wine we bought tasted better when it was so cold that you couldn't taste it at all. Most dry white wine should be served at 10-12 C. No one's asking you to get a thermometer out, but that's a lot warmer than it will be if it's been in your fridge overnight. Fuller-bodied wines such as Burgundies often like to be even warmer, and it's amazing how much more you'll get out of them when they are.
As for red wines, the opposite applies. We are so obsessed with warming them up (I once had a boyfriend who liked to microwave bottles of red wine, often with the cork still in - and with disastrous results) that we let them lose their focus and structure. Full-bodied reds should be served at between 15 and 18 C - just off room temperature.
Medium-bodied reds should be a couple of degrees cooler, and light-bodied ones a couple of degrees cooler still. If the wine has been sitting in the sun or near a log fire, then you'll do it a favour by putting it in the fridge for half an hour or so to take the heat out of it. Then drink quickly, before it has a chance to get too warm again.
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