No Matter What Temperature A Room Is, It's Always Room Temperature

I purchased a bottle of red wine at a winery in Niagara On The Lake recently. The girl who sold me the bottle said, as I was paying for it, “You can chill it for a bit if you want to, but it’s just about perfect at room temperature.”

I looked at her. “Which room?” I said.

This, judging by the look on her face, caught her off guard. “You know – room temperature,” she said.

I nodded. “Yeah, but I have more than one room. So which room?”

She looked slightly flustered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her cheeks slowly turning the color of the wine I had just purchased.

I smiled pleasantly. Perhaps I needed to explain myself further. “In my house there are – ” I squeezed my eyes shut and traced the floor plan of my house in my mind and counted off the rooms on my fingers “ – sixteen rooms spread over three floors,” I explained. “The ones in the basement are a lot cooler than the ones on the second floor by several degrees. They’re almost different seasons. And the temperatures of the ones in the middle vary depending if the windows are open and if the wind is blowing and which way the it’s blowing. And is the air conditioner on or off? So when you say room temperature, I need to know which room you are talking about and under what conditions. There are too many variables.”

At first, she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me like she was afraid of bugs and there was a big one stuck on my cheek. Then she shrugged and said, simply, almost feebly, “I don’t know.”

I leaned in over the counter. “Personally, I like the basement rooms the best,” I said, quietly. “They’re very cold and I don’t like to be hot. But keeping my bottle of wine in the basement would be almost the same as keeping it in the fridge and I’m not totally stupid. I know that’s not what you meant. If that’s what you had meant you’d have said ‘keep it in the fridge’.”

She shook her head slowly from side to side. “That’s for sure not what I meant,” she said.

“And if I kept the wine in my bedroom, on the second floor,” I continued, “it would ferment. It’s so hot up there that I sleep with two fans going – one at the foot of the bed and one on the side.”
“Yes, well – ” she said, looking at the other customers in line behind me and smiling (somewhat nervously, I thought).

“And I sleep in the nude, too,” I said. “It’s way too hot for pyjamas up there. And my little dog, Molly, sleeps with me. She presses her belly up against mine. Sometimes she dreams and runs after something in her sleep and I get scratched.”

“I see,” the clerk said, raising her eyebrows.

“On the main floor it depends where you are and what time of day it is,” I said. “And are the drapes closed or open? The living room and the kitchen are the same temperature, more-or-less, but we also have a solarium that gets hot enough in the summer to melt candles. And that’s just during the day. At night everything changes. At night, is sometimes colder than the basement. In the winter it’s like a freezer. The wine would freeze solid in the solarium in the winter.”

“You know what?” she said. “I’m sure this bottle of wine will keep just fine in the fridge.”

I paid for the wine and she quickly made my change – very quickly, I noticed. Then she put the bottle of wine in a bag and handed me the bag. I also noticed that, as she did this, her hand was shaking.