Cooling champagne
Short answer: serve champagne at 8 to 10 degrees. To chill it quickly, use a cooler with half ice and half water: after about 30 minutes the bottle is cold. In a real hurry? Add a generous handful of salt and it takes just 10 minutes or so. No rush? Count on about 6 hours in the fridge. We advise against the freezer: the bottle can crack and it actually takes longer.
How you experience a glass of champagne is partly determined by the temperature at which you drink it. Too warm or too cold does no favours to the taste. So what is the Perfect Serve?
The right temperature
You usually drink champagne between 8 and 10 degrees Celsius, depending on the type of champagne. A non-vintage is generally served a touch cooler, a vintage a little warmer.
Don’t stray too far from these temperatures; it affects the aromas. At too cold a temperature, for instance, they are harder to taste. At a warmer temperature the champagne becomes heavier and aromas of alcohol can take over. On top of that, the bubbles are less lively.
So the optimum is between 8 and 10 degrees Celsius. How do you reach that temperature?
Chilling champagne
Champagne is almost always presented in a cooler. Coolers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and materials. In principle, anything that holds a bottle, water and ice can serve as a champagne cooler.
In a hurry to chill your bottle of bubbles?
Fill the cooler halfway with ice and top it up with water. Submerge the bottle in the cooler. After about 30 minutes the champagne is cold. Keep a close eye on the right ratio. Too little ice won’t get the champagne cold enough, and with too little water the champagne gets too cold.
▲ Chilling champagne, step by step.
Super rushed?
Add a generous amount of salt to the cooler with ice and water and stir. It triggers a chemical reaction and speeds up the chilling process. Salt lowers the freezing point, so the ice cubes melt faster and the water can hold a lower temperature without freezing. After about 10 minutes in the cooler with ice, water and salt, the champagne is good to go!
No rush?
Put your champagne in the fridge a day in advance and you can be sure it is well chilled. Preferably lay it down horizontally at the bottom of the fridge. After about 6 hours the champagne is cold.
Just before serving, put it in a cooler filled with ice and water for a quarter of an hour. This way the champagne is at its optimum temperature. And you can set the bottle down somewhere handy, so you don’t have to keep walking back and forth to the fridge.
Freezer?
We don’t recommend it. First, because there’s a big risk that you forget your bottle of bubbles or take it out of the freezer too late. Champagne freezes at around –5 degrees Celsius. And yes, then the bottle can “explode”.
On top of that, it takes a lot longer in the freezer for the liquid in the bottle to get cold. The cold in a freezer is based on air, and air conducts heat less well than water. A cooler with ice and water is therefore the fastest and best way to chill a bottle of champagne!
Handy tips
- Preferably go for gentle chilling rather than super-fast chilling.
- Better too cold than too warm. Champagne warms up easily if you leave it out of the fridge or out of the ice bucket for a while. On average about 1 degree every fifteen minutes.
- Notice that your champagne was poured too cold? Then let it sit for a moment or warm the glass with your hands.
- The rule of thumb should be that, after opening or pouring, a bottle is returned to a cool spot as quickly as possible, for example a cooler.
- Keep a tea towel ready by your champagne cooler to dry the bottle when you take it out of the cooler. That way you don’t drip ice water anywhere while pouring.
- Struggling to uncork your bottle gently, and can you feel the cork wanting to pop out? Then the champagne is probably too warm. This can also, by the way, be the result of a lot of movement and shaking of the bottle.
Good luck chilling your bottle of champagne!