If restaurants ever dared to offer the guarantee “Red served too warm? Dinner’s on us,” there would be a lot of free meals. So often the temperature of red wine gets forgotten about, even at wine-intensive restaurants, such that the red arrives at a relatively toasty room temperature of 72 to 75 degrees. Chilling a red makes it more refreshing, reduces your perception of its alcoholic heat, and focuses its flavors. Once you come to this realization, as many burgeoning oenophiles do, drinking reds with a bit of a chill becomes almost a necessity.
One solution is to add ice to your wine, which I will later explain is perfectly reasonable for everyday wine and especially if you have ordered it by the glass (chapter 64). But if it is a bottle that you want to enjoy throughout dinner, ask your waiter to chill it on ice for ten minutes. To keep things friendly, I usually make the request with the informal shorthand, “Would you give this bottle a shock on ice for ten minutes or so?”
I always ask the waiter to pour out a half glass of the yet-to-be-chilled red before it heads to ice. This tide-over pour is vital, because the only thing worse than a warm red is no red at all.