Get A Bottle Of Wine Chilled Fast With One Simple Hack

If dinner's ready and you've realized you left the white wine or rosé in the pantry, don't sweat it — more importantly, don't listen to that friend who tells you to add ice cubes to your glass (unless you like your wine diluted). For moments like these, there's a simple hack to chill a bottle of wine fast, and it involves a perhaps unexpected ingredient: salt. According to Molly Horn, chief mixologist and spirits educator at Total Wine & More, all you need to do is add an ample amount of salt to an ice bucket or large container filled with water and ice. Placed in the ice bucket to chill, your wine will be brisk and ready to serve in no time — about five minutes.

Chilling wine in a bucket of ice water can usually take up to 15 to 20 minutes, but salt helps speed up the process. "I am not a scientist, but it reminds me of making ice cream in summer camp when you were a kid -– the addition of the salt to the ice really speeds up the chilling process!" Horn told Tasting Table, referencing those tasty childhood experiments of shaking liquid ice cream mix in a bag of salt and ice until it solidifies. Indeed, the reason salt helps in both occasions is because it lowers water's freezing point and thus speeds up chilling reactions. Similar to the need to constantly shake the liquid ice cream with the ice and salt for it to solidify, Horn added that "You want to continuously spin the bottle in that mixture for fastest results."

Using an insulated container, metal bucket, or cooler can help speed up the process, too. Since more salt equals faster chilling, don't be shy – add in as much as a cup or two, depending your bucket's size. 

When trying the salt wine bucket hack, be careful not to crowd the container with too many wine bottles or ice. The goal is to cool down the water in the bucket as fast as possible, so if your container has a lid — use it. But, you also want the water to cover the submerged bottle or bottles so that the entirety of the wine gets exposed to the cold conditions. The one possible pitfall of this method, according to Molly Horn, is that it could damage the label. 

"The only thing to keep in mind is if the label is paper, it might strip, peel, or otherwise damage the label. As long as that isn't a concern, this is definitely the fastest and easiest manner," said Horn. If you want to preserve a beautiful label, Horn said "another trick is to get a folded paper towel very wet and wrap it around the neck of the bottle and stick it in the freezer" — though chilling might take around 30 minutes. She also warned that you set a timer, because while you can chill wine in the freezer, you can only do it for so long.

If you just want a slight chill on a Malbec to bring out the red wine's fruit notes or a refreshing class of Riesling without so much wait time, pop the bottles in a bucket of salt water and ice. This hack isn't just for wine, either. If you're hosting a cookout and you accidentally left the beers or the seltzers out too long, you can throw them in too. Just remember, red and white wines require different serving temperatures, as do other drinks — so the time they'll chill will depend on how cold you'd like your beverage.