Freaking out about wine shipping heat damage

The threads pop up all the time. My wine was shipped in September and it was in the 80’s. My wine was shipped in April and it was in the 80’s. Should I be worried about damage?

Poeple tend to not give enough credit to the insulating power of styrofoam shippers. Especially wines going cold chain shipping. “But it spent 1/2 a day in te back of a hot truck.”

I packed my Winecheck yesterday morning with 6 bottles of wine, went to work and when I returned I put a couple frozen water bottles in a couple holes of the styro shipper for insurance as it was 86°. I then went to the Sonoma County Airport, waited outside for the bus to SFO. The Winecheck went into the hold under the bus and we drove to SFO. I then took an Uber to my Brothers house where I spent the night. Got up this morning, got a ride to SFO, checked my bags, flew to Philadelphia where its a balmy muggy 76°, took a cab downtown and checked into the hotel. When I opened the Winecheck the water bottles were still 95% frozen.
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Seriously, if your wine is being shipped cold chain there is no way it’s going to get heat damaged spending 1/2 a day or even a full day in the back of a UPS/FedEx truck.

Doesn’t sound like your box was in 100F for half the day/full day like it would be in a UPS / fedex truck when it’s 85F outside.

Huh??? Not familiar with this term, Brian. Whatzit mean?
But a neat experiment. And I pretty much agree w/ what you assert. Though, I would say, that less than half of my wines
shipped from Calif come in styro shippers any more. More & more, it’s the egg-crate cardboard shippers.
As for myself, I don’t sweat the shipping in warmer temperatures. I ship routinely in the dead of summer and even when
the wine is left on my doorstep for several hrs at 90F temps, the btls are cool to the touch when I open the box.
Tom

Brian, you seem to mostly drink Zinfandel so you would not notice any heat damage anyways

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Truck interior temp is far higher than outside temp and styro has lousy insulation value. R5 per inch.

Cold chain is a UPS service that uses a refrigerated truck and drops it off at your local hub. Then it’s delivered as usual from the local hub.

Yeah, no clue about what “cold chain” means.

A few things: lots of wine is shipped in those crappy cardboard shippers.

You were smart to put frozen water bottles in the shipper. Retailers don’t do that.

Insulation will slow temp changes. If the temp rises it will keep the temps high. If the shipment takes days or a week, or if the package spends the day in a blistering hot brown truck, styro won’t help much

Oh. So I definitely agree that if the wine is shipped in a refrigerated truck then heat shouldn’t be a problem.

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The frozen bottles are not the test, they are cheating. A block of ice stays colder well longer than 50 degree wine. Before refrigerators, there were ice boxes

I get a lot of wine shipments that do not use styro containers, just paper inserts/molds that have absolutely very little thermal protection. Also I do not see “cold chain” options in all the online wine stores I have ordered from, just the usual GSO, UPS and Fedex.

By my reading, your frozen bottles were shipped in pretty good weather and stayed frozen. I am genuinely confused as to what point you’re trying to make here.

On the other hand, a retailer shipped a case of Riesling to my parents into a blizzard in December. The bottles did stay cold, I suppose…

not sure about this. Remember that when water goes through a phase change from solid to liquid it takes a TON of heat to do that. Some ballpark numbers. The amount of heat to phase change 16 ounces of water is 158,000 Joules. Energy in Joules = mass x the heat of fusion of water. That same amount of heat would raise wine (ignoring the 11-16% alcohol in the wine by assuming its water) by about 50 degrees C. dT= Energy in Joules/(mass x specific heat of water). I am also ignoring the specific heat of the glass, although that would be relatively easy to add.

So those frozen water bottles sucked up a huge amount of heat coming into the box, if that wasnt going into the ice, it would be going into the wine.

This does make me feel better about all the frozen water I have scheduled to ship tomorrow.

Brian, good experiment - but as Charlie pointed out, the bag wasn’t in the back of a FedEx truck on a 95 degree day for 6-8 hours. If you shipped a box full of wine and some iced water bottles from say, SF to LA, and then opened it to check on the contents, that would probably be more comparable.

I drive a box truck for work in 90° degree temps all the time. It’s not 100 degrees in the back. Before that I used to drive a step van. The only time it’s 100° back there is when it’s 100° outside. I’ll pick up wine while on my route and drive around all day through Napa and Sonoma in the heat and when I get home the wine is still cool to the touch.

Most people with heat damage had heat damage long befire the wine ever hit the delivery truck. It’s not like they warm up the warehouse and preheat the trucks to 100° before they leave in the morning. Hell I was driving south on 101 out of Healdsburg one day when it was 106 stinking ° out and there was a pick-up truck ahead of me with pallet of wine in the back. Just as my water bottles didn’t thaw wine does not automatically go from 50° to 100°.

Talk like a Pirate Day was yesterday.

Let me type slower so you can figure it out. There was a thread just yesterday where people were concernd that their wine was delivered to them from a winery and the temps were in the 80’s that day. It turns out that the winery in question sent the shipments cold chain. In my example i pulled wines out of my cellar in the morning and boxed them up temps that day were in the high 80’s. When I got home from work I put the water bottles in the box. 24hrs later the water is still frozen even though they were transported and subject to high ambient temperatures during their trip. I really don’t think I came close to simulating cold chain delivery since my wines started out at room temperature.

Note: Of course this thread applies to all wines regardless of who shipped or sold them and regardless of what temperatures they may have been subject to, not just wines shipped from winery cold storage and sent in refrigerated trucks all the way to your local hub. Because, damn it, you all have to be right and I have to be wrong! [sarcasmsmiley.gif]

Glad I was anle to help.

Neither were the wines in the threads I was referring to in the OP. Small details are hard to follow sometimes.

You should have posted it in that thread then.

The majority of people who posted in this thread don’t buy wine from that winery. I would have deprived them of all this great content! [wink.gif]