Chill Cooling Pour Spout Not a Fast Way to Chill Wine

The problem with most giz-watchies and gizmos made for serving wine is that they don’t generally do what their paperwork says they’ll do. But hey, if the manufacturers want to send us their toys, as they did with the cooling pour spout, we’ll test them.

We spent several months playing with Host’s CHILL Cooling Pour Spout,trying to figure out what it does. “Cool, pour & preserve with the CHILL. Just pour the first glass, insert the cooling pour spout & enjoy perfectly chilled wine,” reads the pamphlet and the side of the box. “It’s that easy.”

Except that it’s not. The next paragraph tells you to make sure that reds are at room temperature and that whites are pre-chilled for two hours in the fridge or 15 minutes in the freezer. As in what you’d be doing already. Nor does the information tell you what to do with that first glass of imperfectly chilled wine. You also have to chill the spout for two hours in the freezer before using it. So unless you want to keep the spout in the freezer as a matter of course, you’re not that far ahead of the game. We tried using it to chill room-temperature wine, which it didn’t do at all.

So what does the cooling pour spout do? Not much, really, beyond keeping the wine left in your bottle somewhat cooler while you’re drinking that first glass than if you didn’t have it. This has its place, we suppose, during the hot summer months when we did our testing of the spout. But even then, a bucket of ice would do the same thing. The advantage to the spout is that you don’t have a wet, dripping bottle to contend with. And that’s assuming you don’t want to just leave the half-full bottle in the fridge while you’re drinking your first glass.

Apparently, you can also use the spout’s plug to keep your bottle fresh while you recharge the spout in the freezer. Which doesn’t exactly make sense to us, because you’ll be freezing your wine. Well, wine doesn’t freeze that well at normal freezer temperatures because of the alcohol. Still, you can stopper the half-full bottle up and put it on its side in the freezer without leaks. Hm. We decided we didn’t want to test that one.

Getting wine cooled down quickly is an issue sometimes. Say you’ve just gotten home from work and want a nice bottle to go with dinner and it will take an hour or two in the fridge and you don’t want to wait that long to eat. Even 20 minutes in the freezer is pushing it, but it does work, especially if your freeze your glasses, as well. The fastest way we know to chill wine (or any other beverage for that matter) is to use salted ice water. Salt lowers the freezing temperature of the water, which then transfers all that nice coldness to your bottle. But it does take several minutes.

Keeping your wine cold, however, isn’t that hard, really. You just put it in your fridge or the cooler that you brought with you to the picnic. Spending $18 to $20 on this gizmo to do essentially the same thing – that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Especially when the cooler or the fridge works just as well, if not better.