Do you believe in "travel shock?"

Do you believe in “travel shock?”

Do you believe in “travel shock” per se – i.e. that wine can show badly within a few days or weeks of undergoing shipping, transit or other physical disruption, because of the vibration or movement during the process?

Note that I am only asking about travel shock specifically, not about bottle shock (from the wine first being bottled), or the sediment in an older wine being disturbed and needing some days to settle back down after shipping, or about other ways wine might be affected by heat, cold, light or other things during transit.

Thanks for your response and your thoughts.

Weeks!

I answered, “yes, sometimes” thinking specifically of any wine that throws sediment of any sort. Not sure from the wording of your description above whether that “counts” or not. In any event, I don’t think it generally applies to younger wines that aren’t throwing sediment. At least my palate isn’t refined enough to notice it:)

I believe more in the fact that waiting a week or two won’t hurt the wine.

Me as well.

I had to vote no. I’ve had wines that taste just as good 4 hours after delivery as it was a week later. I’ve also had wines that tasted just as bad 4 hours after delivery as they did 1, 2 and 6 weeks later.

So you drink the good wine twice and the bad wine four times?

So if you believe in travel shock (using Chris’s definition to not include stirring up sediment), how do you take a bottle to a restaurant? Do you think the number of hours of travel makes a difference? Is riding in a car, or in a styro shipper inside a truck for an hour less of a problem then for 3 hours, or 3 days?

I can’t find it at the moment, but there was a great side by side blind tasting video done by a couple guys on the Cindy boards to test this question. They didn’t wind up finding much difference between the wine that traveled months before vs. the wine that arrived the day before or day of. If someone else can find the video, please post the link, I’d love to find it again.

Also, for those that believe strongly in travel shock, does a car ride induce the same shock? What about distribution trucks to your local store?

Finally, I totally buy in as a difficulty with wines with sediment, I’m decidedly on the fence about other wines.

And another question: how much do you think a wine is “disturbed” by driving or flying around, as opposed to being poured into a decanter? I mean, if a little kinetic energy imparted to some liquid inside the bottle is going to change it’s chemical composition enough for you to notice, then surely the drastic action of pouring into decanter or glass has got to be catastrophic to the wine’s integrity, no?

Other than shaking up sediment, I have no evidence of any problem.

I don’t use Chris’s definition…. But to answer your question, I’m pretty comfortable being able to bring an aged bottle to a restaurant. If I’ve kept it upright for a few days, and then transfer it to the car…in my wife’s hands, and say “don’t shake this, keep it upright”, she’s generally up to the task. I’ll do the same with bottles that I bring in a car on a longer trip. Take care of them, keep them upright. But…checking those same bottles as luggage on a cross country flight…I think that can create a problem. The difference between the trip to my local restaurant (or my cabin) and throwing the same bottle as checked luggage onto a flight cross country…they aren’t comparable situations (for anyone who’s watched the way checked luggage gets handled). My two cents.

JVP

Since my version of “disturbed” is predicated on the existence of sediment, I would say that if you take care in the handling of the wine during travel, or take care of the wine during a decant, there is no difference between the two. And…for many of us, with many of our wines, a decant is beneficial, no? So…cutting to the chase, I believe that absent the presence of sediment, handling of the wine in any fashion will not degrade its performance in the glass.

In fact it may even improve it. I’m thinking, at the extreme, of the “MollyDooker Shake” which does in fact work…

I voted yes but only because I didn’t read Chris’ post first. IMO travel shock is due to stirring up sediment. Other than that, I’m not convinced it exists.

My evidence is this: everywhere I travel by plane, I check wine in as luggage (either on its own in a shipper box, or protected in wine travel bags inside of luggage). Most of my travel is just for a few days. I’ve never once observed any issue in wine that had been on the plane going across the country all day that day, or the day before, and this is well into a few hundred bottles of wine. Young wines, old wines, red, white, they’re all perfectly fine.

I’d wager big money that experienced tasters wouldn’t be able to distinguish in a blind tasting between 3 bottles of a young wine that just went Fed Ex to the other side of the country and back and arrived this morning or yesterday, versus 3 bottles of the same wine that has been “resting comfortably in a dark 55 degree cellar on its side” for two months. Who knows, maybe I’d lose, but I almost can’t imagine that I would.

Living in Honolulu, I am convinced it exists. Think about it: even if it comes here from Napa, it is tossed onto a truck, sloshed by starts and stops to Oakland, tossed on a conveyor belt into the cargo hold, dropped to 40° for five hours, tossed off onto a truck, and driven around town for eight hours while it warms up to 70°+.

I believe a wine traveling that way that far cannot be fairly assessed until it has rested six weeks. In one spectacular instance I opened a bottle of the latest-discovery-CA-chardonnay after just three days and pronounced it the equivalent of a Burgundy from a Brigadoon-like appellation straddling Meursault and Puligny. It was refined, coiled, exquisite.

I raved about it to the producer, whose bemused reaction was, “What are you talking about?!?”
Alas, after having sat here another month, the next five bottles said, “Surf’s up, dude!”

Unfortunately, I reported the petite syrah in the case tasted the next day as being dumb as a post, which evoked the same response from the winemaker, but this time not bemused.

Not waiting was not fair to me, to the wine nor to the winemaker. Lesson learned.

As soon as a shipment arrives from France I wait a couple of minutes for the wine to settle down before I attack it.

I most agree with what others have said regarding sediment but I usually wait for a while just to be safe.

Bottle shock isn’t about sediment being disturbed. The sediment issue isn’t controversial.

There’s an endless debate about whether, apart from sediment, wines suffer from transit. Certainly lots of people in the trade think it’s an issue and don’t like to pour wines that haven’t had a week or two to settle down after coming across the Atlantic.

I think my bottles are shocked when they arrive at my home and go into the cellar and not ‘under the laquiole’.

Seriously though, I think older bottles could be susceptible to shock. Something I nearly never ever worry of.