How can I track the temperature along a shipping route?

I’d like to find out the temperature range between point A (wine store) and point B (my office) to determine when it’s safe to have my wines shipped. I suppose I need to determine the FedEx and UPS ground routes, then search cities in between.

Thanks for any suggestions to simplify the process!

Million dollar question. Probably no current way to tell…?

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Sometimes tough to figure out the route. But once the route is determined, I like to use this: NOAA Graphical Forecast for CONUS Area

Xavier,
That’s helpful; thanks!
I went to Fedex’s website, but their “ground route transit maps” are just time estimates, not ground route transit maps.[swearing.gif]

You’re welcome, Warren. I believe there are ways of finding out what the “likely” routes are, but I can’t remember how. I believe, though I’m not sure, that you can do a Google search and find routes from the various hubs. I did it once when I had something being shipped from Tennessee. The NOAA graph helped a lot.

A bit off topic but related. Way back when plasma tv’s were 10’s of thousands of dollars I worked as a manager of an electronics department of a retail chain. Anyhow there was a big worry that if they were damaged in transit who was responsible and who was on the hook. Ultimately they had the shipper install these inexpensive meters on the box that would indicate if the temp ever got too hot, too cold, or if there was an impact. It was three separate stickers available in various temp thresholds and g force maximums. I believe it only added $50 or so to the shipping cost, so Ive always wondered how come they never made it into the wine world. Anyhow, back to the topic at hand.

A more advanced version of this is available for wine. I don’t think its use is very widespread. I believe due to cost that it would be used by importers rather than for single cases.

For shipping routes, I like to look at a national map like the one linked in this thread. Then I can look at the likely routes (probably one of the major W>E interstates for my West Coast orders) and see what the high temps will be. Sometimes I look at forecasts for individual cities along the way to also see what low temps look like and get an idea of actual temperature throughout the day.

It would be very useful to have this information, as to standard ground routes and maybe even air routes for
FedEx and UPS, collected and organized. If there was an app that correlated that information along with current weather forecasts so that you plugged in the starting point and destination and you saw the forecast for the wine route, how cool would that be?

In some thread in the past the indefinite nature of the shipping routes was discussed. I think the wineries that ship around the country have a great deal of personal knowledge of how their wines travel, but this has not been “collected” and shared in a centralized place, and apparently shipments can get taken to certain hubs that seem wildly nonsensical in being “out of the way”. I too wish that we had a quick and reliable way of knowing the routes so we could decide when to ship. Any suggestions?

Just don’t look.

Seriously.

Well, that certainly is a simple solution. Takes a load off!

You can check the temperature during a shipment by including a data logger, we use them to check the temperatures during the shipment from winery to port, and to make sure we’re getting the proper temperature on the container. This is no help for a prospective shipment, though.

Seriously.

Think about a Burgundy or Bordeaux bottle.

The wine likely got trucked from the winery to a port, then sat on a shipping dock at some point, waited to go through customs, then maybe in a container somewhere on some boat, then to more shipping docks, then stored lord knows where as it was being made ready to go to the distributor, then the resaler, then to us. The physical “provenance” of a wine has so many angst inducing moments, I just trust it to miraculously arrive at my store or home and I take it from there.

Which contained has the fine wine in it? What was the weather like?

Just trying to decide when to safely pull the trigger. It’s looking more like November at this point.

Getting things chipped up from CA to Seattle is fairly straightforward, it seems…checking Redding CA temps for things from Northern CA, and checking Anaheim (and Redding) for things from Southern CA is what I have been told. For shipments from the east coast I have no idea…it sometimes seems like by the time temps in some areas cool down enough there are freezing temps in the mountains. Please, anyone chime in if they know more than that.

You know, eggs, milk, ice cream, produce, meat gets shipped all over the place with no concerns about outside temps or the season. Why can’t wine be treated as well as milk?

People don’t think of wine as perishable.

Here is a map:

http://www-archive.shipcompliant.com/resources/tools/temp-map/

That is very interesting. What is the story with this?
Is this a sample for a service that wineries pay and sign up for?

I think wineries can use the maps or download a zip file. I’ve used the maps but the high limit is only 70.

There should be another thread on WB