MELBOURNE, Australia — Ludwig Bemelmans, who is best known today for his “Madeline” series of children’s books, was an acute observer of life at the table. I thought of Bemelmans while at tables in several of Melbourne’s high-end restaurants.

Melbourne has an energetic, almost fevered restaurant scene. Australia is enjoying a years-long economic boom, and cities such as Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth are awash in money. I’ve never seen as many late-model Ferraris and Lamborghinis as those that regularly cruise the streets of Melbourne — not even in Beverly Hills.

With such free spending, you can imagine how avid Melburnians are to hobnob at the latest and greatest restaurants. The city’s restaurants brim with patrons, many who drop hundreds of dollars on a bottle on wine.

Yet there’s one problem in Melbourne’s restaurants: Wines are served at grossly inappropriate temperatures. White wines come straight from the refrigerator with an Antarctic chill; reds are served much too warm.

This brought to mind Bemelmans’s observation about the plight of gourmets, namely that: “The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection.”

Although at odds with Australia’s casual, put-another-shrimp-on-the-barbie image, cities there now have genuine gourmet cultures. The Aussies themselves never would put it that way (it’s too elitist for their “we’re all just mates” culture), but the sort of perfection-seeking described by Bemelmans is precisely what’s emerging Down Under. Coffee, for example, is as perfectionist and complicated here as it is in Seattle.

What makes the wine temperature issue so odd is that the wine service in Australia’s better restaurants is otherwise good. The glassware — usually a major pitfall in restaurants — is appropriately sized and properly shaped for the wine served. Wine lists are often not merely adequate, but extensive, well chosen, and plumped with European wines that would be esoteric in America, never mind in even farther-away Australia.

It’s a tricky matter to discuss proper wine temperature, as the subject is fraught with affectation or at least persnicketiness. I remember a wine judging in Italy where one of my fellow judges (an Italian, I might note) whipped out a pocket thermometer to assess the wine in his glass. He pronounced himself satisfied with almost theatrical pomp.

Such geekiness aside, few things are more influential in your estimation of a wine than its serving temperature. You might actively dislike a great red wine simply because it’s been served too warm, and you can be baffled by the hoopla over what you’ve heard about a great white wine by having it served too cold. A warm temperature makes any wine, red or white, taste soupy and even swampy. A wine that’s too cold just shuts down, as unavailable as a lover after a quarrel.

Is there such a thing as the right temperature? Here’s where well-meaning wine writers, like etiquette columnists, become monsters of correctness, decreeing a precision that does nothing but breed insecurity and resentment.

The trick to temperature is this: Cooler temperatures make red wines taste fresher, but they also highlight a red wine’s tannin content, which is that gritty astringency you find in young reds. Some grape varieties, such as pinot noir, are intrinsically less tannic than others, such as syrah and cabernet sauvignon.

Consequently, pinot noir and gamay often tastes great when served surprisingly cool. In Burgundy, their pinot noirs and gamays are frequently served at their cellar temperature, which is really cool — about 50 degrees F. — given Burgundy’s ancient cold stone cellars.

Closer to home, what do you do in a restaurant where, as the host or designated wine maven, you want everyone to enjoy wine but without intrusive geekiness? The simplest approach is this: Ask for an ice bucket with very little ice and a lot of water. You’ll have to emphasize the “a lot of water” part because waiters everywhere define “ice bucket” with extreme literalness: You get a pile of ice on top of which your bottle is planted like Robert Peary’s flag at the North Pole. This is useless.

Once that challenge is managed, you then ask that your white wine, if possible, come from the cellar rather than the fridge. Of course most restaurants don’t really have a cellar, so it will come from a case in a storage room somewhere. No matter: At least it won’t be semi-frozen. Plop it in your ice bucket for five to 10 minutes and you’re good to go. Ditto for red wines.

This is a defensive strategy, I know. But it’s often necessary, even essential, in places like Melbourne — and, regrettably, New York too — where restaurants just can’t be bothered about serving their wines at plausible temperatures.

If caring about this makes you or me a Bemelmans-type gourmet, well, so be it. We’re paying for the wine, at typically three times the restaurant’s cost, no less. The least we can do is drink it the way it ought to be served.