Refrigeration: Serving wine

Refrigeration plays a part, and all too often a villainous part, in the serving of wine. Long before the advent of mechanical refrigeration, and its domestication, wine was deliberately chilled prior to serving (see Ancient greece, for example). It was fashionable to chill both red and white wines before serving at least from the 16th century. A wide range of wine coolers was used to achieve this until the 20th century, when mechanical refrigeration was domestically available. The modern successors of these large containers for both ice and bottles are the single-bottle wine coolers known as ice buckets and the gel-filled flexible sleeves kept frozen ready for use.