Room temperature

The concordance below suggests that room temperature is a useful phrase to know when translating wine tasting texts into English, as it is frequently used.

It also provides information in compact form about its linguistic context, e.g., that wines should be served at room temperature, though they could also be drunk, savored and enjoyed at that temperature; and that in some cases they have to be brought to or let come to room temperature first.

Ambient temperature

Compared with room temperature, the phrase ambient temperature is much less frequent (2 vs 35 occurrences in a corpus of approximately 1.5 million words).

More interestingly, the contexts of use seem rather different (though with this little evidence we should be wary of hasty judgements). Notice:

• the absence of any of the verbs we observed above
• the mainly referential function of these text extracts (as opposed to the more directive function with room temperature above, where we saw many imperative forms)