Best Ways to Keep Wine Cool While Outdoors

keep wine cool outside

We’re always looking for creative ways to keep cool during the summer months and one of our favorite ways is enjoying a nice, cool, crisp glass of wine.  A chilled wine is a great way to beat the heat and relax, but there’s just one problem, keeping it cold.

While certain wines are designed to be drank at room temperature, slightly chilled, or chilled, no wine is really designed to be drank at the same temperature as the summer heat.

Do you really want to be drinking 90-degree wine on a 90-degree day? That doesn’t sound very appealing to us.

Thankfully there are plenty of ways to help keep your wine cool while hanging out outside.

How to Keep Your Wine Cool While Outside

The most obvious way to keep your wine cool during the summer is to leave the bottle in the refrigerator while outside enjoying your glass, but refrigerators aren’t always an option.

These tips will help you keep your wine cool when you don’t have access to a fridge.

1. Ice Bucket or Cooler

One of the most obvious ways to keep drinks cool during the summer months is to place them in a bucket of ice or a cooler of ice. If you’re planning to be outside with a bottle of wine, the best thing you can do is to place the bottle in the bucket and then fill it up with ice. This will ensure that every time you go back to the bottle for another pour, it will be nice and cold.

If you have chilled your bottle beforehand, then a cooler, even without ice, will do a great job of retaining the temperature of the bottle for a little while.

2. Insulated Wine Bag

Have you ever used a koozie on your cans or bottles when drinking outside in the summer? If so, then you know the idea behind an insulated wine bag.

An insulated wine bag will help the wine bottle retain the temperature just as a koozie does with a can. You can find these bags at a reasonable price, and they do a great job of keeping your wine cool for a couple hours.

These insulated wine bags will not help cool down a warm bottle of wine and will not keep the bottle cold for extended periods of time, but as long as you’re drinking at a normal pace, then these bags should keep your bottle of wine cool until the last drop.

3. Wine Chiller Bucket

Another way to help keep your wine cool is to use a wine chiller bucket. These buckets are typically designed not to use ice, but rather to radiate the cooler temperatures from the wine bottle itself and use them to help keep the bottle cold.

There are also wine chiller buckets that include an ice pack that fits into the center of it so you can freeze the ice pack and place it in the bucket, giving the bucket the ability to keep the wine cooler for even longer.

In fact, the wine chiller buckets that use ice packs can even cool down your warm bottle in a matter of minutes.

4. Cooling Spout

Technology is an amazing thing, especially when it comes to chilling your wine. A wine cooling spout is a device that goes into the freezer and once frozen, goes into the opening of your wine bottle. It contains a metal rod that becomes extremely cold from the freezer and leads to chilled pours every time.

These cooling spouts will help keep your wine cool with every pour but will not typically help to chill a warm bottle of wine.

If you’re looking for a good way to keep an already chilled bottle of wine pouring cold, then a cooling spout might be the answer you’re looking for.

5. Unique Ice Cubes

We’ve talked about using grapes as ice cubes in the past, but it really is a great idea for helping to keep your glass of wine cold without watering it down.

This tip doesn’t focus on keeping the bottle cool as much as it does a single glass of wine.

Frozen green or red grapes will help keep your glass of wine cool without the possibility of watering down your wine. With typical ice cubes, as they melt, you’ll start to notice your wine losing its flavor, but grapes don’t melt, so you won’t run into that problem.

And let’s be honest, frozen grapes in a glass of wine add a cool touch to any picnic or barbecue.

If you’re running low on a bottle of wine, and you have another bottle of the same ready for the next day, you can pour the last little bit of wine into ice cube trays and freeze them. Then, when you’re ready to crack open that second bottle, you have ice cubes made from that same wine, so you won’t water it down.

Wine in the Summer

We enjoy wine all year long, but there’s nothing quite like a nice, chilled glass of wine while sitting on the porch on a warm summer evening. The tips above will help ensure that you’re not stuck sipping on warm wine as the temperature climbs. There’s nothing worse than drinking a hot wine.