Does half a bottle of wine cool faster than a full bottle when placed in the same ice bucket?

Answer

Dear Philip,

Yes. A half bottle of wine will cool faster than a full bottle of wine.

To drop the temperature to 0°C, you need to extract a certain amount of heat from the wine. That amount of heat is proportional to the mass. So you have to extract more heat from a whole bottle of wine and that will take longer.

Now you could object that half a bottle of wine also contains air, but the heat capacity of air (a gas) is very small compared to that of wine (a liquid). In other words, you need to extract very little heat from the air to cool down. So that won’t make a difference.

Kind regards,

Philippe Tassin
Physicist Iowa State University