Could the Crowd Favorite not really be the Crowd Favorite?

Our first hot tasting, and it still wasn’t that hot, around 80F. This might sound like a safety announcement, but temperature, mainly heat, can be the leading cause in liking or not liking your wine.Red wine first: Many fellow tasters have heard me saying, repeatedly, that red wine should be served between 66-69F. That’s room temperature in the world of wine. And you can still really enjoy reds into the low 70s. Most wine cellars hover around the upper 50s to low 60s. Bring out your bottle of 58F red wine, open it and set it on the counter or table (not in the Sun!) and let the wine come up to “room” temperature. Doing that will ensure you get the wine experience that the wine maker intended you to get. Don’t have a wine cellar? My favorite technique is to open a bottle of red wine, then put it in my fridge, top open, for somewhere around 30 minutes. Take it out when the bottle feels cool to the touch, NOT COLD! Very big difference there.White wine needs to be colder, mostly around 50F. If I know that I am going to drink a white wine soon I will put it in my 40F fridge for a while before using it, even several days out. Then I take the bottle out, open it and put it on the counter. Just don’t let it sit long, it will be ready to drink very quickly. A white wine bottle SHOULD feel cold to the touch. And with both red and whites; Don’t forget that your wine glass will heat up your wine.My favorite wine tastings are mostly outside, where temperature control becomes very difficult because of our mostly hot year. The temperature will also affect you. It’s hot outside, you drink a cool refreshing sparkling wine that has been a crowd pleaser and you are probably going to enjoy it. The experience of that first cool crisp wine will be elevated even more when the rest of the line up gets too warm. You get to the end of the tasting and what did you like? The first cool refreshing one of course. But, because of the heat, and resulting warm wine, you probably missed one that you would have liked if it were served at the correct temperature.So this was the case at this tasting. Garganega Frizzante has been a previous Crowd Favorite. Most people said that it was their favorite. It is good and a great value. But it was hot outside, and many of the wines very quickly passed into the “too warm” category. So should it have been the Crowd Favorite, again? Maybe, but maybe not.