Just how cold can wine get? (dalboz17/Creative Commons)

I recently received an invite from some friends for an evening of grilled clams and “cold, cold wine.” As the chef in question is marvelous, I’m sure the grilled clams will follow suit. But the mention of wine got me thinking. How cold is “cold, cold,” and how chill can a glass of sauvignon blanc get?

Cold Wine on Earth:
According to Live Science, the coldest recorded temperature in the lower 48 states was minus 70 degrees F (minus 57 degrees C) at Rogers Pass, Mont., in 1954. Broaden the search to the entire Earth, and Russia’s Vostok research station in Antarctica reached a fluke low of minus 128.6 degrees F (minus 89 degrees C) in 1983.

Cold Wine in Space:
That’s some pretty cold wine (or vodka and beer, I suppose), but for even colder naturally occurring temperatures, we have to leave the Earth entirely. The Kelvin scale accounts for the lowest theoretical temperature in the universe: 0 degrees kelvin. To put that in perspective, the record Earth lows mentioned above would be 216.48 kelvins and 183.93 kelvins.

Absolute zero on the Kelvin scale (minus 459 degrees F, minus 273 degrees C) entails a complete absence of heat and the cessation of all molecular motion. The temperature is so cold that it simply doesn’t occur naturally in the universe as we know it. Even the deepest, blackest reaches of the cosmos only get down to around 2.7 kelvins (minus 454 degrees F, minus 270 degrees C). You can thank cosmic microwave background radiation for this.

The Boomerang Nebula. (Image courtesy Hubble Heritage Team/NASA)

So yeah, deep space sauvignon blanc would be pretty frigid — perhaps even “cold, cold.” But for the coldest observed naturally occurring temperature in the universe, you would have to travel to the chillingly beautiful Boomerang Nebula. Here, according to NASA, a high-speed wind of gas and dust from an aging central star cools molecules in the nebular gas to roughly 1 kelvin (minus 457.87 degrees F, minus 272.15 degrees C).

Cold Wine in the Lab:
Back on Earth, we can reach some low temperatures through artificial means. According to BBC News, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets down to temperatures of 1.9 kelvins (minus 456 degrees F, minus 271 degrees C). Although absolute zero is probably unattainable for both physicists and wine enthusiasts, scientists continue to push the lower limits in the lab. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Wolfgang Ketterle’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge managed to attain 810 trillionths of a Fahrenheit degree above absolute zero.

In reality, however, I’m sure we’ll actually want to drink the wine with our clams (plus Emily Post always said never bring a protoplanetary nebula or an atom smasher to a party unannounced), so we’ll need it in liquid form. Alcoholic beverages freeze at different temperatures, depending on how much of it is water and how much of it is alcohol. This is why you can stash a bottle of vodka in the freezer, but beer and wine will explode. The exact freezing temperature for wine depends on its alcohol percentage, but according to this insightful article from the Accidental Scientist, the freezing point of wine is generally thought to be about 15 degrees F (minus 10 degrees C). That’s 263.71 kelvins.

So there you have it. Even the unequaled Teddy Pendergrass would have agreed that’s as cold as even “cold, cold wine” should be.