So depending on the literature, proper storage temperature should be approximately a consistent 55 degrees. Higher temps should invite a more rapid aging of wine up to a point. I am doing an experiment with two bottles of 2012 Mondavi Oakville Cabernet. One goes into cooled cellar at a consistent 55 degrees for one year. The other stays in a dark closet, that across the year cycles from approximately 65 - 75 degrees. Wonder if I will notice a difference. I picked the 2012 Mondavi Oakville as it seems today that it benefit from some time.
Over the span of a year, I don’t think there will be any appreciable difference.
My guess is that you’d have to wait more than a decade to see a difference, but that’s just a guess, and I commend you for actually putting it to a test.
Sounds like something fun to try out, why not.
Maybe if you can get a box and try out every couple of years for a while.
I think it might take less than that, like2-3 years. Should really take Colin’s suggestion and break up a case, pairing 55 and 65/75 wines every other year to see the difference, that would be interesting.
A better experiment would be cellar 6, put 6 in your closet, and do the test at something like 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10-12 years.
Nobody really knows the answer … Your experiment is very cool … I would guess by year three you will see a very big change … Keep is posted …
Salute !!!
I would definitely take the other side of that bet - three years at 55 degrees versus 65-70 degrees?
But I’m just speculating, same as John. It would be interesting to see the result - better still if you can get a few other experienced tasters to do the blind tasting with you whenever you have it. One person guessing 50-50 is less persuasive.
As suggested by Chuck, I would do the experiment with significantly more bottles than just 2. Given bottle variation that can occur (especially with wines under cork) it seems pretty useless to do an experiment with just two bottles.
With a big wine like you are intending to use, I would also wait at least 5 years before opening the first bottle and even that is likely still on the very young side.
Why not use a more fragile white wine for the experiment (preferably a well-filtered one under screw cap; don’t use any unstable bio freak wines 
)? Such a wine is going to reveal differences much sooner and likely much more noticeable than a big red wine. I think that thereafter you can safely conclude that if there is a difference with such a white wine, there will also be differences with other wines.
Hmm. If the point is simply to find out if one bottle will age faster than the other, I wouldn’t bother to do the experiment at all. That wine stored at higher temperature will age faster than wine stored at lower is very well established.
There’s something known as the Arrhenius law or Arrhenius equation (formulated more than a century ago by Swedish Noble-Prize-winner Svante Arrhenius). Although it is more of an empirical generalization/approximation than an absolute law, it works well enough for present purposes. And what it says is that the rate of reaction (the speed of aging) approximately doubles when the temperature is increased by 10 C. So if you store one bottle at 10 C and another at 20 C, you can expect the latter bottle to be aged to the same degree after five years as the former after 10 years.
What is not known, however, is to which extent the average speed of the aging process is all that will set the two bottles apart even if we assume (unrealistically) that so-called bottle variation is not an issue. It could be that the fast-aged bottle will have somewhat more of certain substances and somewhat less of others after five years in comparison with what the slow-aged bottle will have after 10.
Nor is it really known which of them will taste better to some representative sample of wine drinkers when tasted at comparable aging times (five years for the 20 C bottle and 10 years for the 10 C bottle). The standard recommendation of 55 F/13 C storage temperature certainly does not rest on hard scientific facts. Temperatures in the vicinity of that figure may work just as well or better from certain points of view. What we do know is that if we go high enough on the temperature scale (above 20 C at the very least), then certain reactions will start to take place that wouldn’t otherwise occur (or occur only to a limited extent), and that the results are not to most people’s gusto.
Was at a tasting about five years ago in which one person brought the Chateau Montelena 1994 from his cellar where it had been stored since purchase while another person brought the same wine that was stored passively since he bought it. So, roughly they were aged about 15 to 16 years and the difference (to me) between the two was profound. The one stored passively was still very nice but the fruit was more muted and not as lively as the one stored in the cellar. I would give the one stored in the cellar a score of 95-98 points while the other would have been about 90 pts.
As others have said, I don’t think a single year is going to matter.
Moreover, the 65-75 temp range isn’t all that warm - most wine you pick up from a retailer has spent time at that range and if it’s expensive and it’s been at the store for a while, it’s pretty much a guarantee. There are a few places that keep their entire store cool 24/7, but not many.
The other issue is that you have a wine that’s not only big and tannic, but it’s also clean and it’s been stabilized and built to handle that kind of storage. I think the difference, if any, would be more profound with a lighter wine that’s a bit “dirtier” if you will, in other words something bretty and unfined and unfiltered and unsulfured.
But whenever you do it, you need to have someone else pour the wines for you and your friends - someone who doesn’t know which is which so you won’t either. That will at least help eliminate some bias going in.
And FWIW, I’ve stored some wines at those higher temps for many years. They were fine.
As far as a ten degree temp increase doubling the rate of aging - what to say? “Aging” is not a single reaction. There are many things going on, some dependent on others, some not so much, some beneficial and some detrimental, some affected greatly by a 10 degree difference and others not so much. Not all reactions are working in synchronization. And then of course, there are other issues, like brett, etc. And then your perception thresholds vary for different things, so the occurrence of something may or may not matter.
Different rates of aging are well known in the world of fortified wines. Barbeito in Madeira deliberately constructed their lodge with this in mind. Very warm areas and very cool ones. Now this is in cask so the results will show much faster than bottled wines. I once tasted an experimental wine from Blandy’s which I swore was thirty or forty years old, but was only twelve. It was aged in a warm area, in a small cask, with a lot of head space.
I can’t find it online, but maybe 30 years ago there was a fun article about this topic that used a bottle set on the author’s window sill for a year or two vs.a bottle ‘stored properly,’ and the writer, IIRC, preferred the window sill wine.
I agree that above a certain temperature, changes in the wine would take place that would not be seen in a bottle that never reached that temperature, so comparisons like that may not be apt.
Also, I don’t think of it as ‘aging faster,’ as that would imply the wines reach the same destination, only at different times.
Chateau Margaux has a passive cellar, and has done forever, with seasonal variations of 10-12 degrees F. Works pretty well. I don’t doubt that a passive cellar is different from an active one, but if the swings aren’t too broad and the upper limit isn’t too high, it isn’t a difference I’d be particularly concerned about.
Nonetheless, I am quite sure that a closet floor in my house would see temps above 75 degrees. I’d never store wine long term in such a situation.
Thus the interest in actually doing the experiment.
I seem to remember David Coffaro doing an experiment like this in one of his blogs (don’t remember if it was accidental or purposeful). Might be able to find that.
Rudy Kurniawan and John Kapon are known to be experts on “accelerated” wine aging.
Surely this experiment has been done many times in the past, under controlled conditions, so it would be useful to find some of that data.
Calling Tom Hill!
We wine producers taste the same bottling over and over and over - sampling, of course! Not drinking 
I will say, with my rosé, where the impact of storage temp shows up faster in a sheer wine, and working on only my 7th vintage, I’m scrutinizing every subtle shift looking for outcome of some sort of experiment undertaken, I notice bottles in my home cellar (~66-68) vs. new cases arriving direct from the winery’s warehouse (dead on 55F); those that lounged a couple months at home open up faster in the glass.