Hi. A friend of mine who lives in Montecito was evacuated for two weeks during the Thomas fire. The fire came with 1200 feet of his house but it did not burn. There is a lot of ash and smoke. He has a wine cellar and is concerned about the smoke damaging the wine in his wine cellar. Any experiences or comments? Are there any labs that can test bottled wine for smoke taint through the cork? Thank you.
Stephen, I’m not knowledgeable in this area but I would be curious to know how much smoke actually reached the wine cellar, e.g. cellar in basement, cellar inside house, outside, etc., to have an idea how much smoke the wine in the cellar was exposed to.
At our old location, people smoked cigars in the building and we never gave it a second thought until a customer we shipped wine to let us know all the bottles smelled like cigar smoke when he opened the shipper. He said the smell went away after wiping down the bottles. All the wines were fine and he wanted to let us know should people start complaining. Changed the layout and eliminated smoking in the same room. Those bottles had some pretty good smoke exposure but I don’t know how it compares to smoke from these fires, but I’d bet the effect would be negligible on the wine, even if the bottles stink. Open one or Coravin a bottle or two and find out. It’s cheaper than having chemical testing and if a bottle or two they test are tainted are you going to pay $2,500 to be told your wine is gone?
Compared to the oxygen in the air that has been present for all the years his older bottles have been stored, wouldn’t some smoke in the air for a week or two seem fairly minor in comparison? If corks were that leaky, we wouldn’t age wine.
-Al
test bottled wine for smoke taint through the cork
A lot of wine from Europe has to travel though New Jersey. I can tell you from first hand experience, some of it is also stored there!
Take a trip out there and smell the refineries. Yum!
So Stephen - you probably don’t drink any wine from Europe. Lucky! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
This.
Also, note that O2 molecules are very small compared to smoke particles and many aromatic compounds, so O2 would get through corks more easily. Sound corks hold back CO2 under high pressure and (at least according to one study) TCA from the environment.
Stephen - ETS Labs has a smoke test using GC-MS(triplequad) to test for guaiacol and it’s methylated analog. https://www.etslabs.com/analyses/%23SMOKEQ . These should be the current simple markers to note whether a wine has seen smoke exposure inside a bottle. Using a coravin to pull out samples seems straightforward. If your friend is concerned about possible loss and insurance coverage they should have that discussion with ETS Labs to see if there results can be used as concrete evidence for that purpose.