How to Serve Old Wine Without Ruining It

How to serve old wine comes down to three things: the temperature in the glass, the shape of that glass, and whether the bottle is sound before you pour it for anyone else. The OIV standard for international wine competitions has jurors taste red wines at 15/18 °C, white and rosé wines at 10/12 °C, sparkling wines at 8/10 °C, and naturally sweet wine, ice wine, liqueur wine and mistelles at 10/14 °C. Those bands matter because temperature moves the wine on the palate. Lower temperatures emphasize acidity and tannins while muting the aromatics. Higher temperatures minimize acidity and tannins while increasing the aromatics. A cold pour shows you structure. A warm pour shows you perfume. An old bottle then adds two checks a young one rarely needs: what has settled out of the wine, and whether age has crossed the line into fault.

What temperature should you serve old wine at?

Pour to a band, not to a feeling. Alongside those competition temperatures, the OIV adds a rule most dinner tables skip: pour every product of the same type within the same session at the same temperature. Two glasses of one wine at two temperatures are two different wines.

We cut the same ground finer, by weight rather than by colour.

Style	Examples given	Serving temperature
Full-bodied red wines	Cabernet Sauvignon, Nebbiolo based wines	15 to 18 °C
Medium-bodied red wines	Grand Cru Burgundy, Sangiovese	14 to 17 °C
Light-bodied red wines	Beaujolais, Provence rosé	10 to 12 °C
Full-bodied white wines	Oaked Chardonnay, Rhone whites	12 to 16 °C
Medium-bodied whites	Chablis, Semillon	10 to 12 °C
Full-bodied dessert wines	Oloroso Sherry, Madeira	8 to 12 °C
White sparkling wines	Champagne	6 to 10 °C

The Wine & Spirit Education Trust states in the same entry that medium and full-bodied reds such as Vintage Port, Rioja, Bordeaux and Burgundy sit at 15 °C to 18 °C. It puts lightly chilled oaked whites such as White Burgundy at 10 °C to 13 °C. Our wine serving temperature chart covers the styles this table leaves out.

The room counts too, and this is where most old bottles are lost. The OIV specifies an isolated, quiet, well-lit, well-ventilated, odour-free room for its juries. That room keeps its ambient temperature, to the extent possible, between 20 and 24 °C. Pour into a room warmer than that and the wine will not stay where you put it.

Does an old bottle need air, or does air finish it?

Both, which is why the decision is worth making deliberately rather than by habit. We say the bouquet of wine is best revealed by gently swirling the wine in a wine glass to expose it to more oxygen and release more aromatic etheric, ester and aldehyde molecules. One exception is absolute: sparkling wine should not be swirled to the point of releasing bubbles.

Air also does damage, and an old bottle has been taking the slow kind since it was sealed. The AWRI records that acetaldehyde levels increase as wines age due to chemical oxidation of ethanol. Above 125 mg/L, the AWRI reports, acetaldehyde imparts odours described as over-ripe bruised apples, stuck ferment character, sherry or nut-like. Its description of oxidation runs from a dulling of the aroma, to cardboard, straw and hay-like aromas, to sherry-like and madeirised, with wet wool, wet dog or varnish-like in extreme cases. An old wine sits somewhere on that scale before you touch it.

There is a second reason to be careful with a carafe. The AWRI reports that some wines develop mousy taint when exposed to air or oxygen, that the mechanism by which oxidation enhances mousy taint is currently unknown, and that there is no satisfactory method to remove mousy off-flavour. Our guide to decanting old versus young wine works through when the sediment argument outweighs the oxidation argument.

What is the sediment, and does it matter?

Two different solids turn up in an old bottle and only one is what people mean by sediment. Tartrate crystals, generally potassium bitartrate, form from the union of tartaric acid and potassium. They look like grains of clear sand, are also known as wine crystals or wine diamonds, and may appear to be sediment in the wine though they are not. They also form in wine bottles that have been stored at low temperatures, and consumers often mistake harmless tartrate crystals for glass shards or wine faults.

The rest is the wine dropping clear on its own. During the secondary fermentation and aging process, which takes three to six months, proteins from the grape are broken down and the remaining yeast cells and other fine particles from the grapes are allowed to settle, so that the originally cloudy wine becomes clear. A winemaker racks the wine off those lees. A sealed bottle has nobody to rack it, so whatever falls out stays there until you pour.

The Court of Master Sommeliers grades what you see in three words. Its Advanced and Master Sommelier deductive tasting sheet opens with clarity and visible sediment, scored clear, hazy or cloudy, before anything else about the wine is recorded. More detail sits in our explainer on sediment in old wine.

How do you tell if an old wine is faulty before you pour it?

Smell it, then taste it, and know the two catch different faults. Assessing a wine's bouquet can reveal cork taint, oxidation due to age, overexposure to oxygen or lack of preservatives, and wild yeast or bacterial contamination such as those due to Acetobacter or Brettanomyces yeasts.

Cork taint is the fault that hides. The AWRI names 2,4,6-trichloroanisole as the main compound responsible, with a distinct musty, mouldy aroma. The AWRI reports a consumer rejection threshold of 3.1 ng/L against a consumer detection threshold of 2.1 ng/L. It also found that TCA at a concentration as low as 1 ng/L suppressed the ratings for overall aroma intensity and of positive fruit-derived characters of a particular Semillon. A lightly tainted bottle does not announce itself as mouldy. It reads as muted.

Volatile acidity is the vinegar note. The AWRI puts its reported aroma threshold in wine as low as 0.1 to 0.125 g/L, while the concentration at which the acid is regarded as detrimental is usually greater than 0.7 g/L. Its companion, ethyl acetate, is perceived as the odour of nail polish remover with a reported sensory threshold of 12 mg/L. Normal wines run about 30 to 60 mg/L and defective wines about 150 to 200 mg/L.

Some faults never reach your nose at all. The AWRI notes that mousy taint is rarely detected by sniffing, because the compounds involved are not volatile at wine pH. The AWRI adds that it is generally perceived late on the palate or after the wine has been swallowed, usually taking a few seconds to build. Its warning applies to any line-up of old bottles: "If you move quickly to the next wine in a line-up, you might miss a mousy wine."

Not every strange note is a defect. The AWRI describes dimethyl sulfide as one of the major compounds found in aged wines, formed during the maturation of wine in the bottle, contributing at low concentrations toward the body of aged white wines with a vegy or blackcurrant character, and reading as asparagus, cooked corn, cooked tomato or molasses only at higher concentrations. Its sensory threshold sits between 30 and 60 µg/L. The Court of Master Sommeliers gives candidates a short list for a minor presence of faults on the nose: barnyard, nail polish remover, caramel, nuts, dried fruit, struck match, balsamic vinegar. Our guide to corked and oxidised wine faults covers what to do once you have found one.

Which glass, and how much wine in it?

The glass changes what you smell. The ideal shape, is considered to be wider toward the bottom with a narrower aperture at the top, tulip or egg-shaped. Glasses which are widest at the top count as the least ideal.

The reference point is the INAO glass, adopted by INAO as the official glass in 1970, given its AFNOR standard in June 1971 and its ISO 3591 standard in 1972. It is lead crystal, with a rim 46 mm across, a calyx 100 mm tall, and a total volume between 210 ml and 225 ml. Its opening is narrower than the convex part so as to concentrate the bouquet. Capacity is approximately 215 ml, but it is intended to take a 50 ml pour.

Read that last pair of figures again, because it is the practical instruction. Most of the glass is meant to be empty. The OIV backs it up: each sample must be presented in a glass corresponding to the category, at least the standardised international type ISO 3591: 1977, and it recommends that glasses be changed for every sample.

How should you line up more than one old bottle?

Order first, because a mature wine has the least to spare. The OIV runs its sessions in a fixed sequence: sparkling whites, still whites, sparkling rosés, still rosés, sparkling reds, still reds, wine under a film of yeasts, sweet wine with residual sugar derived from grapes, ice wine, liqueur wine, wine with an alcohol content modified by dealcoholisation, white wine with maceration, and mistelles. Within a category, samples are generally presented in the order of vintages.

The OIV specifies the furniture as well. Each juror gets an individual table with a white surface, a carafe of cold water, pieces of bread, paper towels or handkerchiefs and a discard receptacle. The OIV forbids smoking, requires jurors to switch mobile phones off, and tells them to avoid perfumes. The white surface earns its place: A wine's colour is better judged by putting it against a white background, with the glass held at an angle.

Colour is not decoration on an old bottle. The Court of Master Sommeliers lists orange, garnet and brown among the secondary colours a red can show. It also asks candidates to record rim variation on red wines, and places the wine on a three-point age assessment: youthful, developing, or vinous.

What food does an old bottle want?

Match weight before you match flavour. We put the balance between the weight of the food and the weight or body of the wine as the most basic element of pairing. It notes that heavy, robust wines like Cabernet Sauvignon can overwhelm a light, delicate dish like a quiche.

For a mature red the sharper lever is protein. Tannins react with proteins. Paired with dishes high in proteins and fats such as red meat and hard cheeses, the tannins bind to the proteins and come across as softer. In the absence of protein from the food they react with the proteins on the tongue and sides of the mouth, accentuating astringency and drying the palate. Fish oils can make tannic wines taste metallic or off. Spicy and sweet foods can accentuate the dry bitterness of tannins and make the wine seem to have off flavors.

The old trade anecdote, attributed to British wine merchants, has the same chemistry behind it: "Buy on an apple and sell on cheese". Fruits high in sugar and acidity, such as the malic acid in green apples, can make wines taste metallic and thin bodied. Hard cheeses such as cheddar can soften the tannins in wines and make them taste fuller and fruitier. For a worked example on a specific style, see what to pair with mature Bordeaux.

Serve it while it still has fruit

Everything above is the last mile. The decision that costs real money is when to pull the cork at all. No decanter and no better glass can rescue a bottle held past its band.

Set a drink-window alert and you get told when a wine in your cellar enters its band, so the bottle reaches the table while the fruit is still there to serve. To see what the wider market is paying for mature vintages first, start with our fine wine market index, then check which of your bottles appear on the drink-now list.