To really experience the nuances of a bottle of wine, it’s extremely important to drink it at the right temperature. If your house is like mine, it’s impossible to get any bottle near “cellar temperature.” Plus, most household refrigerators are too cold, which hides the aromatic bouquet of the wine when you pour a glass.

While they don’t fix temperature control of your apartment or have dual-zone technology, a scrappy way to mitigate this problem is a solid wine thermometer. This removes any Goldilocks-guesswork from the equation indicating when your wine is “just right.”

There are plenty of wine thermometers on the market but most of them are questionably expensive or work once and never again. After testing a lot of equipment, we found this little wraparound gadget to be a top contender.

Don’t be fooled by its simplicity, this thermometer is the most reliable we’ve ever used. It’s not a huge piece so it doesn’t take up storage space in whatever drawer you throw it in. Most importantly, it doesn’t use batteries so it’s never dead when you actually want to use it. We can’t emphasize that enough, because there is nothing worse than when you want to use a tool like this and the little batteries (which, let’s be honest, nobody ever has spares of) die.

To make things even easier, it has reference markers on it showing what temperature the most common varietals should be served at.

After all, who needs guesswork when you can have perfectly chilled Chablis?

See The Thermometer Now!