Guests are twenty minutes away and the white is at room temperature. There are four ways out of this and one of them ends with a burst bottle and a freezer full of frozen wine.
Ice and water, never ice alone
This is the part most people get wrong. Air is an insulator, so a bottle standing among dry ice cubes only touches the ice in a few places and chills slowly. WSET recommends an ice bucket three-quarters filled with equal quantities of ice and water so the bottle is fully surrounded, in its service and storage notes. Water carries heat away from the glass many times faster than air.
Add a generous handful of salt to the iced water and it works faster still, because salt lowers the freezing point and the bath gets colder than plain ice water can.
The methods, ranked by minutes
Ice, water and salt: 10 to 15 minutes Ice and water: 15 to 20 minutes Wet paper towel around the bottle, in the freezer: 15 to 20 minutes Freezer, bottle alone, timer set: 20 to 30 minutes Refrigerator: 2 to 3 hours from room temperature Running cold water over the bottle: slow, and wasteful
Every figure assumes a bottle starting at normal room temperature and ending somewhere in the serving range rather than ice cold. A bottle that started in a hot car takes longer.
The freezer rule
The freezer works, and it is also how bottles get destroyed. Wine expands as it freezes, which pushes the cork out or splits the glass, and a forgotten bottle in a freezer drawer is a genuinely unpleasant discovery. Never put sparkling wine in the freezer, because it is already under pressure.
Set a timer on your phone. Not a mental note, a timer. This is the single most common way people ruin a bottle in their own home.
Do not overshoot
Colder is not better. Below about 6 C the flavors in white, rose and sparkling wine are masked, and an over-chilled bottle tastes of very little until it warms up in the glass. The serving temperature chart gives the target for each style, and full-bodied whites in particular want only a light chill.
If you do overshoot, cupping the bowl of the glass in your hands brings a glass up a degree or two in a couple of minutes. It is the fastest safe way to warm anything.
Chilling a glass rather than a bottle
If only one person is drinking, chill the glass instead. Frozen grapes or a couple of soapstone cubes cool a glass without diluting it, unlike ice cubes, which turn the last third into water.
And if the wine is a red that has been sitting in a warm room, twenty minutes in the fridge is the fix. Chilling a red slightly is not a mistake, it is often the reason a simple bottle suddenly tastes fresh.