Cool the wine quickly! (Addition)

During the discussion of a previously published article about a gadget for cooling wine, the most heated discussion arose about the practical benefits of wrapping a bottle with a wet towel (napkin) when placing it in a freezer. Opinions are divided. I promised to conduct an experiment: cooling bottles with a towel, without a towel and with a cold accumulator.



I will make a reservation right away. Please do not suspect me of bias. An invention I described in a previous article is a Bluetooth thermometer that can measure the temperature in a freezer. How the bottle is cooled is indifferent from the point of view of the invention.



The course of the experiment.



Three identical bottles of water from a cold tap were kept for 5 hours on one shelf of the cabinet. Before being placed in the freezer, they had the same temperature of 22.5 ° C. The mass of a dry napkin carved from a cotton waffle towel 20 grams. The mass of the napkin moistened with cold tap water became 74 grams, that is, it absorbed 54 grams of water.

He wrapped one bottle with a napkin, the second remained “naked”, and placed a previously frozen cold battery on top of the third. In addition, the third bottle is placed on a thermally insulating mat to ensure convection of the wine in the bottle, which I need to correctly measure the temperature with my thermometer. And this also ensures that not a single gram of wine is supercooled, since a denser cold wine immediately drops down to the “warm” rug.



The bottles are placed in the freezer drawer and left for 20 minutes at a temperature of -18 ° C.

After 20 minutes, bottled water had this temperature.



Conclusion: a wet towel really speeds up cooling, but worse than a cold battery.



Only the cold accumulator needs the right one: weighing at least 500 grams, which retains plasticity after freezing and has a crystallization temperature slightly above -18 ° C. In this case, -14 ° C.



After freezing, the napkin was weighed again. Her weight was 68 grams. Less than 1 gram dripped from the napkin to the bottom of the freezer drawer. That is, at least 5 grams of water has evaporated. It was due to evaporation that the cooling accelerated.

The course of the experiment is recorded in the video so that you can track inadvertent errors of the experiment that affect the result.



It is likely that using a bucket of ice, water and salt can cool the bottle faster, but somehow it's all difficult to use.



Finally, I want to speak about the idea that often appeared in the comments: put the wine in the freezer and predict its temperature by timer.



There are at least two obstacles to this idea.



1. The domestic refrigerator is not thermostatic. If it is nofrost, then periodically enters defrost mode. In this mode, nothing freezes and generates a small amount of heat, not cold, inside the freezer. If the refrigerator is not nofrost, then a "fur coat" grows in the freezer. And this also significantly changes the course of cooling the bottle.



2. The bottles are very different.









A white bottle has a mass of 366 grams and a dark one has 902 grams. That is, their wall thickness differs by about 2.5 times. The heat from the liquid through the bottle will go away 2.5 times slower, and it will take 2.5 times longer to cool a dark bottle, all other things being equal. Or something else, because the thermal conductivity of different glasses also varies over a wide range.



That is, the accuracy of reaching the desired wine temperature by the timer method will be very low, probably, plus or minus 5 degrees in the general case.



Thank you for attention.



PS At the request of the panelists, I conducted another experiment. One bottle in a wet paper towel in one layer soaked in water 15.7 ° C. Another with a cold battery. Both with an initial water temperature of 22.4 ° C. Duration in the freezer 10 min. Result.





PSS In the concept of "cool wine quickly" all the words are important. Wine is also a key word because the temperature of its serving is sometimes important.

If you just need a cold wine, then you just need to store the supply of bottles in the refrigerator and drink for your pleasure.

If you need wine at a temperature of 17 ° C for good meat and welcome guests, then the thermometer from the first article , which is put on the neck, will provide you with the right temperature while you fry the meat. There are no other convenient options for measuring the temperature of a rapidly chilled wine. How you cool the bottle, you can and a freezing spray, it does not matter.