Top picks for picnic wines

This summer I hope we can enjoy a new outdoor-eating vibe. Out with the second jumper, restaurant blanket, overhead heater and fingerless gloves. In with lounging on newly mown grass or a vine-shaded terrace, concerned not with keeping the main course warm but with keeping our wine cool.

My preferred way of doing this is to use those cylindrical wine coolers. They involve no ice cubes or drips and are pretty good at maintaining a steady temperature for any bottle of wine. The plastic ones are the lightest and I have a battery of clear ones that allow you to see, at a glance, the contents.

But if you are setting out on a picnic, transporting such hardware might be a bit of a pain, while cool bags can cause inconvenient condensation. There is a new sort of reusable, insulated wine bottle, very like those colourful water bottles so many people carry, designed specifically for wine: £24.99 apiece from supdrinkware.com or £35 in a smart tube from partnerinwine.co.uk.

They both also sell insulated beakers with lids — presumably for really slow sippers — and have a range of colours. (I’m not quite sure about Sup’s pale turquoise one for wine, but clearly I need to throw off decades of conditioning.) These insulated bottles are lighter and less breakable than glass and could be added to a picnic bag without any risk of soggy sandwiches.

They wouldn’t work for sparkling wine; the wine would lose much of its fizz when decanted into them. Nor would they be suitable for fragile wine that should not be exposed to air before being consumed. So that Montrachet from the 1930s might spoil when decanted into a Sup bottle, but most modern wines shouldn’t suffer at all.

For a casual picnic, I’d be all in favour of wine in a can. Cans are light, convenient, recyclable and relatively good for the planet. Cans and connoisseurs are not a match made in heaven but I have come across a few canned wines that I would drink happily in any circumstances and which are cleverly labelled. The Uncommon, Gerald’s Bubbly White Wine 2020, is a light young English fizz based on Bacchus, a distinctively English grape with aromas of hedgerow. This current vintage offers a good balance of fruit and refreshment.

Master of Wine Richard Kelley has come up with three wittily packaged South African wines available in cans: Chenin No 5 2019, The Francophile Syrah 2020 and Vasco and the Explorers Alvarinho 2020.

These are delicious by any measure and also available in bottles. South Africa seems to be a particularly rich source of good canned wine, thanks largely to CanCan, a canning company co-founded by talented winemaker Francois Haasbroek.

Drinking wine straight from a single-serve can mean you miss out on most of its all-important aroma; on the upside, it may reduce the risk of infection. Speaking of which, someone ought to design a simple way of distinguishing between wine glasses; I use different coloured rubber bands round the stems but they are not exactly elegant. Another advantage cans have over bottles is that, for impecunious newcomers, they involve less commitment of money and drinking capacity. A wine bottle contains 75cl of wine, three times as much as most cans.

Another package for wine that is becoming more respectable and might be particularly suitable for a barbecue is the “bag in box”. The St John wine company, an offshoot of Fergus Henderson’s cultish restaurant in Clerkenwell, has long been a particular fan of this format, selecting a red (best value by far), white and rosé each year to retail at £38 for a three-litre box that is the equivalent of £9.50 a bottle.

Private Cellar, a company that seems dedicated to supplying well-heeled, wine-loving country dwellers, has chosen five-litre boxes for its rather superior Provençal rosé Figuière Mediterranée (they have keen thirsts in the shires). This pale, dry, lightly smoky wine is £76 a box, the equivalent of £11.40 a bottle.

Serving red wine in high temperatures is quite an art. I always put bottles in the refrigerator for an hour or so

I would have thought the challenge when entertaining outside on a hot day might be to keep the box cool enough. Admittedly, because of the volume, it won’t warm up as fast as a bottle, but one of those silvered thermal blankets might help. There may be an opportunity for someone to make them tailored to wine boxes with an opening for the tap. The team at Private Cellar suggests chilling the cardboard box beforehand and then opening it at the top and putting an ice pack on the foil bag.

There is always an ice bucket — or just a bucket of ice and water — to cool non-cardboard wine packages such as bottles and cans. Do remember that contact with icy water is much more effective than with ice cubes alone.

Serving red wine in high temperatures is quite an art. I always put bottles of red wine in the refrigerator for an hour or so before taking them outside and then keep them in one of the cylindrical bottle coolers mentioned earlier. Red wine served too warm, anything much above 24C, is pretty unappetising: the refreshment value that is key to all drinks is lost and much of the complex aroma dissipated. Indeed, even indoors, I increasingly serve reds straight from our cellar, which is a constant 13C, so that they warm up gradually in the glass. The exceptions to this are young reds with masses of the chewy tannins that are emphasised at low temperatures. These I would serve initially closer to 16C or 17C.

There’s a certain sort of hearty red that seems a natural partner for the smoky flavours and often chewy meats associated with barbecues. I have suggested a few from the wines I have tasted most recently, along with some wines from quintessential holiday locations such as Cassis, Bandol and Bellet on France’s Mediterranean coast.

It seems especially appropriate to choose wine from countries where barbecuing is a national sport: Australia, South Africa and Argentina spring most readily to mind.

And if it rains, or is unsea­sonably chilly, one of these full-bodied reds might offer some liquid comfort.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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