Vibration

What does everyone think about vibration (regarding wine…please keep your minds out of the gutter )? I have a cellar and realized that the back side of one of the diamond shaped racks touches the cooling unit, making bottles on that particular rack section (40-48 bottles) vibrate. It’s fixable, but would be a bit of a pain. Should I care? Does vibration harm wine?

Not an expert but ive always understood that vibration is bad for wine, being constantly vibrated seems like it would affect the aging process.

I would fix the problem

Yes I would try whatever I could to eradicate any vibration. It’s known to be detrimental to the aging of fine wines.

Gotta ask the obvious contrarian question… how do we know vibration is a problem? I would imagine the effects of vibration on long term again has been studied or tested even less than the effects of temperature.

Greg T told me.

Nice find.

I’m not really sure what this proves. And all we have access to is the abstract without paying for the complete study.

20G is a lot of vibration. A hell of a lot more than you’d get from a poorly isolated (like is the case in most of our active cellars) cooling unit. So the 20G data really isn’t worth considering.

I’m not surprised that there are some accelerated chemical changes to the wine, but who says that’s a bad thing? Could be it ages the wine more quickly, but in a better way then when experienced by higher temps?

All I’m saying is that the type of vibration we are trying to avoid typically hasn’t been proven to be harmful. While subjective, I’d be more impressed or influenced by an experiment where 6 bottles from a case of age-worthy wine were stored in a cellar where vibration from a cooling unit was poorly isolated and the other 6 bottles were kept in a relatively vibration free environment. Age them for some period of acceptable time based on the wine in the study. 10 years? And then comparatively taste them to see if any negative effects could be observed. Again subjective, but more conclusive than an experiment where wine is exposed to abnormally high vibration levels and chemical analysis is performed.

As many have stated, wine is a hell of a lot tougher than we give it credit for.

Curious, does it mount “through the wall” or what?

All things being equal, and they never are, why subject your wines to excess anything if there is even the slightest chance you could shift one way or another? In this case a quicker maturation.
We all know that extreme cold could form crystals on a wines cork and even if common agreement is it is harmless, wouldn’t one not to not send on the coldest of days and ipt for a better time?

+1

Couldn’t agree more considering the investment. Why neglect the vibration when it can be fixed. Enough data may not be available but why take the chance? We all know that wine is pretty durable but like you stated, extremes can subject wine to unnecessary damage.

I owe you for that one.

The problem is there’s very little science on the effects of vibration. People speculate that there may be some stirring of sediment, but nobody has any science to back up any claim that vibration is harmful. Or more importantly, what amount of vibration is harmful. I have never read anything definitive (and yeah, I do look at that stuff) to state that movement over such and such a threshold is harmful because of blah blah blah.

All that said, I’d prefer my wines not to be subject to a lot of movement. OTOH, I pick up and turn over the wines in my cellar all the time and haven’t noticed any detrimental effects over the years. All in all I think that we obsess over things more than we need to. We care but the wine doesn’t necessarily care.

How do you know, your wine told you?

Atoms vibrate regardless unless your cellar is really cold.

the Lexington Ave Subway runs under my wine cellar (possibly 60 feet below the cellar). After living here for 30 years I no longer feel the gentle rumble, and my wine is just fine.

I’ve posted this several times before, but here it goes again:

Matt Kramer, in Making Sense of Wine, says that Dr. Vernon Singleton of U.C. Davis studied the effects of vibration on wine, and concluded that vibration is of no measurable consequence unless it is violent enough to produce cavitation - and that “the vibration necessary to cause cavitation in a bottle of wine, one may be sure, is far removed from everyday life.”

Cavitation: Cavitation - Wikipedia

I have searched for Dr. Singleton’s research report, but have been unable to find it online.

Singleton, V.L. (1962). Aging of wines and other spiritous products, acceleration by physical treatments.
http://ucanr.edu/repositoryfiles/hilg3207p319-134802.pdf

Merci.

Yes. Vents out the back into a large unfinished portion of my basement.

Thanks everyone for the replies. I’m likely to get it fixed. As some said above, given the investment, probably a safer bet even if we really don’t know the effects.