Ice Cubes & Wine Will Do Me Just Fine.

Does that make me a wine-heathen or just fashionably eccentric?

Blazing hot weather makes it essential to sip a cold beverage. Let's be honest, you wouldn't sip a so-so cold cool drink, would you? Even though I don't partake in Coca Cola anymore, I still have that wonderful lingering memory of tipping back my head and taking a first sip ( on a boiling hot day of course ) of an extremely chilled can of coke. So chilled that it had bits of ice floating in it. Oh gosh, that was just so good.

As you know, we are steeped in wine around here and palates are geared towards noticing a good wine and that is just fine in normal climes. With our current heat wave ( the third one this season ) it should be a must to only drink wine with an ice cube floating in it.

Fridges can only chill a bottle of wine so much and no more. The minute you pour the wine into your glass, the condensation forms on the outside of the glass and makes the wine already a bit less chilled and to be honest, a warmish white wine is a punishment for the taste buds. Unless you drink your wine like you would a cool drink, after a while you have a tepid wine in your glass. Yikes, not so nice.

I've taken to putting ice cubes into every glass of wine be it white or red. If my wine is chilled enough, I don't have to hurry to drink it. This weekend we had a few parties at my parents and we of course felt brave enough to organize ice cubes to put into our wine. At first a few members of my family ( the wine enthusiasts ) raised their eyebrows but after a while they surreptitiously dropped an ice cube into their glasses and we in fact ran out of ice cubes.

I think I've started a new trend ( of course in the southern hemisphere ice cubes in wine is old news ) because we were at a local Heuriger on Monday and my aunt was lamenting about the rather warm glass of white wine she got served.

" You know, the other day at a restaurant they served ice cubes with the wine and it was such a good thing."

She had muddled up where she had had the ice cubes, but she liked them in her wine.

This weekend we are going out in our village and I am already trying to organize for myself a portable ice cube bag. Naturally I will be looked at and considered even more eccentric than normal but once others have tried their wine a bit more chilled, I predict we will be changing our village name to Eccentric Central.

Biggi