It’s been, what, two or three weeks since we’ve had this discussion? Actually, the ongoing “Wine transport” thread got me thinking about this again, so I did some simple calculations to demonstrate that travel shock can’t be real. If you want to read through some previous threads, here are a few. Fun to see posters who aren’t around any more:
http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=117
Let’s first stipulate that travel shock is something many believe “stunts” a wine in some way, and takes time to recover from. What that “something” is, no one seems to know, though many believe in it. I’m going to eliminate the components of stirring up sediment, and temperature changes from my arguments. If you shake up an old wine with a lot of sediment, it goes without saying that the bottle should sit for a while to let the sediment settle. And if a wine gets cooked during travel, that’s not travel shock, it’s cooked wine.
So, let’s get to it. For travel shock to exist, there has to be some chemical change taking place. A reversible chemical change (because, supposedly, the wine recovers weeks or months later). And it has to be a chemical change that can be caused by just the action of gently moving the bottle in a car, boat, or plane (please be patient, because you’ll soon see what “gentle” action needs to happen to effect a chemical change).
Let’s put some numbers behind this: typical molecular bond energies are on the order of 200-600 kJ/mole, let’s say 300 on average. That’s the energy it takes to break, say, a carbon-hydrogen bond in a molecule of ethanol. Or we can use the hydrogen bond energy, which is an order of magnitude less at about 20kJ/mole. Or we can think in terms of activation energy for a reaction, which is in the same ballpark with numbers like 100kJ/mole (a “typical” value). I realize these numbers are probably meaningless to most readers here, so let’s think about it in another way: If we wanted to impart 20kJ/mole of energy to a bottle of water by dropping it on the ground, we’d have to drop it from 75 miles up. You read that right: 75 miles. And that’s just to disrupt the weakest of interactions between molecules, the hydrogen bond. To break real covalent bonds takes another order of magnitude. Which, btw, is why skydivers whose parachutes fail to open don’t explode in a cloud of gas. They just go splat.
Here’s another example to help get a sense of scale: how fast do you have to throw a snowball at the wall to give it enough energy to melt when it hits the wall (assume the snow is just frozen at 0 degrees C)? Answer: 816 m/sec, or over 1800 miles/hour. No, you’re not reading this wrong. You need to fire that snowball at more than twice the speed of sound. And that’s just to melt the snowball, you haven’t changed the resulting liquid water to wine by altering its chemical structure - that would take a lot more energy (as shown above).
Now, think about the energy imparted to the contents of a bottle during transport: driving along a bumpy road, sailing along a gently rolling sea, even taking off and landing in a 747 - none of those are even in the same zip code as the energy needed to change any chemistry of a wine.
And we haven’t touched on the notion of “reversible chemical reactions”, which are actually not very common. Most reactions take place because the end products have total energy lower than the original reactants (some reactions are driven by entropy over energy, but they are less common). Once the reaction happens, it doesn’t just “reverse” on its own back to the original components. That takes energy. Usually more energy than was required for the forward reaction. But this doesn’t really matter in the discussion, because we’ve already seen that jostling a bottle of wine around can’t possibly cause any chemical reactions in the first place.
Though that does raise the question: is there some mystical property of “travel” that affects a wine differently from just carrying it around, or pouring it into a glass? I’m at a loss to think of what “energy” could be imparted to a bottle while riding in a container ship that’s not there when I carry the same bottle out of my cellar, or tip it over and pour out the wine. Or swirl the wine in my glass. Or take a sip and swish it around in my mouth.
If the science told us something other than that we need many orders of magnitude more energy than can possibly be supplied during “travel”, I’d be happy to leave the door open on the question of travel shock. But it doesn’t. Believing in travel shock is like believing you can broad jump across the grand canyon.
The truth is that nothing we do to a wine while carrying it, pouring it, swirling it, etc., changes its composition. Just like shaking your orange juice or salad dressing bottle doesn’t change it (except to distribute the contents more evenly), stirring your coffee, blending a smoothie, etc., etc. We don’t worry about those things because they do no harm.
So, believe in whatever mystical travel shock gremlins you like, but science tells us travel shock can’t happen.
Oh, and will the folks who advocate putting wine in a blender to “open it up” please talk to the travel shock folks who worry about jostling a bottle while driving down a bumpy road? But if you’re really worried about travel shock, make sure to drive the Royal Deluxe II to your next offline
