Throughout the years we’ve always found ourselves caught up in discussions about the effects of certain things on a bottle of wine, predominantly temperature. Now we could be like much of the industry and simply stick to the perfection rule that all wine must be kept between 52 and 65 degrees through all of its life or it will be ruined. That not only refers to the storage in your home or office, and the temperature of the place where you acquired the bottle, but all points in between including the weather through which it is shipped from beginning to end. In a perfect world, sure, why not? But let’s face it, things in your life are rarely this perfect.
It gets warm, it gets cold, and people make mistakes. We aren’t going to try and tell you that those fears are overblown. But there are people out there that think anything short of perfection is actionable. They think that the UPS driver should be there at a specific time to avoid any prolonged ride on the truck when the temperature is over 70 degrees, and that the driver should wear insulated gloves so as not to transfer any body heat to the wine when he touches it. Yea…right. With all of the new virtual reality stuff that’s happening these days, maybe someone will come up with that perfect world. But in the meantime, it isn’t realistic.
We once saw a merchant claim in a written advertisement that all of his wines came in refrigerated trucks. Hmm… ‘Long haul’ trucks might be refrigerated. We shipped a lot of loads from a Washington State importer with a company that also hauled fish. Sometimes the truck smelled, um, like the sea? But the wine arrived in great shape. Shipping containers for expensive wines, and even not so expensive wines, were usually refrigerated. But as far as trucks that delivered from the local distributors, or couriers around town, we only saw one refrigerated truck per year…the Romanee Conti release. The rest of the time they were at ambient temperature. For everyone.
Our merchant ‘friend’ was being less than honest, but often consumers are over-the-top the other way, saying two hours on a truck at 80 degrees is ruinous. It isn’t, and we say that knowing there are plenty of holier-than-thou types in the industry that will call us out because it is easier to be elitist. It’s easy to preach perfection, a lot harder to actually do it where weather and human beings are involved.
We’ll tell a short story about an experience a few years ago. I put a case of mixed Burgundies in the car after work and went off to do a bit of ‘research’. Upon getting home, I went straight into the house, forgetting that case of Burgundy in the trunk. I did not have occasion to go into the trunk for another week during a very warm July, essentially driving the case around town until one day when I had a reason to get into the trunk…and saw the case. My reaction was, oh shucks (or…something like that). But I figured it was a way to test the heat/wine thing real time (bear in mind I am a trained professional).
The heat was substantial but not extreme (90s but not over 100). Over the course of the next month I had those twelve bottles. Eleven of them were just fine and one was corked (which it would have been regardless of temperature). We continued the experiment for years testing the occasional shipping ‘mishap’bottles as they came back. For the most part, we found that in the difficult cases, the wine did show some deterioration after a few months, even sooner in the cases where the corks were pushed up (which of course would allow more oxygen to reside inside the bottle)*. But most were good to go early on.
What we are getting at is that, much of the time, if there is a temperature ‘accident’, it is rarely the proverbial ‘bullet to the brain’. It can, and again we are talking extremes, cause deterioration over time probably as often because the airspace in the bottle changed as being the direct effect of extreme heat or cold. If it does happen, like we said, as long as you get to it sooner (let’s nominally say within a month or two), you should experience little if any perceptible depreciation. So if it is a ‘drinking bottle’, as most bottles are these days, go ahead and drink it. The one caveat is ‘natural wines’. Since such wines are not typically stabilized, a change in temperature might occasionally set off an unanticipated reaction within the wine itself .
“wine is a living thing, which means it can take anything you can”
Obviously nobody goes out of their way to create these unfortunate scenarios. We do our best to avoid them and mediate the weather with our shipment timing as best we can. We tell people picking up wine that, when it’s hot, they should put their wine inside the cabin of the car where its air conditioned and go straight home. Some don’t listen, go to the mall for two hours and complain to us because the bottle leaked.
If someone asks us to ship into Phoenix in August, we will simply say no. One must be cautious to a point. However weather being what it is, you never know for sure how it will play out.
In truth, most of the industry doesn’t worry about it that much. But then something like 90% of the wine purchased is consumed with in a couple of weeks so it’s rarely ever an epidemic. The point is we don’t live in a perfect world and sometimes stuff happens. When it does, don’t panic. Move those bottles up in the rotation, serve them at the proper temperature, and most of the time you’ll be just fine. Occasionally unfiltered wines might throw off some extra sediment. In those cases, stand them up a day or two, and then proceed as planned.
While we always practice, and recommend, exercising caution, wine is not as fragile as some might have you believe. As someone told us once, yes wine is a living thing, which means it can take anything you can. In other words, except in extreme cases, it isn’t ‘life or death’, at least in the short run.
* Extreme heat or cold will cause liquid to expand which will push the wine out of the cork or push the cork itself up in the neck. As it comes back to a more normal temperature the wine will contract to where it should be, minus any that pushed out. In either case, there may be a larger air gap in the bottle, which will accelerate the process. It’s basic physics.