Nice work! As Brian says, the other interesting experiment would be to do this with a full case shipper, and then monitor a center bottle vs. an outer wall bottle. I think it’s pretty safe to speculate that the pulp shipper isn’t going to provide nearly the insulation that styro does, but will be nice to see a real result.
This is super and much appreciated work.
It would make sense that the outermost bottles in any kind of case shipper would be more vulnerable to both thermal and mechanical shock, so it would also make sense if the manufacturers of these inserts made the outer walls thicker. Shouldn’t be very hard to make new molds or reconfigure the extruders.
love it. thanks for doing this.
I also wanted to thank you for this data. It is very reassuring.
Can you also run it using the cardboard egg crate shippers and also the flat styro/foam shippers?
No doubt they are inferior. I am curious as to how much more inferior they would be.
Thanks again for the great work! You should submit it to a wine magazine for “publication” and get paid for it.
run it in those crazy styro shippers that Crush uses. I bet the temp fluctuates like 5 degrees at most. Those things are beast!
There are “summer shippers” that are made with much thicker outer walls (styro, stand up type shippers) that include slots for frozen cold packs in the middle (1 cold pack for a 6 pack, 2 for a 12 pack). I assume these are what Crush is using? Would be interesting to see what the performance of these are (with and without the cold packs).
We put a thermometer in the back of the FedEx truck and when it was 95 degrees outside it was 135 in the back of the FedEx truck.
I would assume it would spend close to 15-20 hours during the entire shipping process in the back of said vehicle.
No bueno.
Yes but probably not to a great degree given wine is only 12-15% alcohol. Alcohol has a lower specific heat than water which means it takes less energy to raise the temperature of alcohol.
The weight of the bottle has some effects as well.
no, no slots. It’s just this really thick soft malleable styro wrapped in grey insulation sheets. THe bottles get real snug in them. Once we put a cold bottle at the very bottom on a friday. Sunday morning the bottle was still pretty cool to the touch.
Styrofoam has about 30% lower thermal conductivity coefficient than paper/cardboard. More importantly, styro shippers are generally much thicker than most pulp shippers I am familiar with. This is the why people who choose to use pulp usually do it for environmental reasons.
Very impressive - thanks for sharing!
Cheers
Ah, I’ve used those shippers. I reuse shippers from my local/personal wine storage facility (ones that are in good shape, of course) and they had several. I had a few comments from folk about how cold the bottles were when they arrived. I deliver the packages to the Oakland shipping hub myself, so that helps a bit (by avoiding sitting in a truck on my side). Still, I was pleased/surprised they performed so well.
Delivery trucks to business addresses almost always have more geographically compact/shorter routes (based on a full truck) than residential routes. So it’s worth the effort to find a business address to ship to so the time-in-truck can be shorter on the back end. Lower incidence of delivery problems to business addresses as well. Delivery problems really cause havoc with wine…I had one this spring (totally my fault unfortunately). The wine spent 3 weeks travel time (cross country shipment). The wine was in ok/drinkable shape but it was slightly affected. An extreme case, but delivery problems are to be avoided at all costs for the happiness of the wine.
This would mean that even at 70 degrees (what most would consider safe shipping weather) that it wouldn’t be unusual for the back of a FedEx truck to be above 90 degrees which would still mean that the wine itself would at times hit 80+ degrees.
I don’t think it’s an instant correlation though. Maybe at 95 degrees the sun radiates at a higher strength and raises interior temperatures more. I’ll tell you based on my experiences of not having AC on when it’s 95 degrees outside, the interior of the house gets up to 85 or so. But when it’s 80F outside it doesn’t get past 75. lol
I got one of these recently during our heat wave. Two days after being shipped…wine was still cold and so was chiller pack.
Fantastic thread, Paul. Thanks a lot for doing this.
I’m looking forward to more experiments and results.
This is great - thanks for posting, Paul! Nice to see some real data.
Has anyone heard of a “not to exceed” temperature for wine? I see a lot of stuff on where wine should be stored (69 degrees as the upper limit), but I have not heard anything about what’s considered hot enough to cook the wine.
Nice work and thanks for the data Paul.