Warm Mark

I found this on a bottle in my Saxum shipment that just arrived. I searched and found this product mentioned here about 4 years ago in relation to monitoring wine storage, but it seems more useful to monitor shipping. WarmMark | Temperature | SpotSee

So it’s been around a while, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it used. If your shipment got hot it will tell you and give you an estimate of the duration of the exposure. Considering that
one tag is $1.20, I’m surprised they aren’t used on all high end wine shipments.

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Wish we had a tag like that for people walking around with asymptomatic Covid. Weird that my mind went there first?

Saxum has been using that on the past few shipments. They put it on jusy one bottle in the shipment…great idea and too bad more producers do not do this

Those would eliminate the discussion about styrofoam inhibiting heat for any time longer than an hour or so.

+1

If you stick it in the oven for a few minutes does it actually change colour? Ponsot used a dot like that on his labels that didn’t change colour at all when I baked the (empty) bottle in the oven at 300F for 15 minutes.

Adrian, Must have been a “Rudy” that you baked, eh?

It looks like the company is making them for medical shipments to monitor for excessive heat or cold You can get them for almost any temperature threshold. You activate the tag. Not sure how long it lasts after activation. Still. If you’re shipping a case of wine that costs hundreds of dollars, why not spend $1.20 on a tag that will tell you if your wine was exposed to high temperatures?

When I last tried ponsot’s labels they worked. At one point they were paying a printer for a heat sensitive dot that wasn’t being printed correctly so they didn’t work. This went on for several years. The domaine is well aware of it and has corrected it. I don’t think there is another domaine that has done a fraction of the anti-counterfeit work than they have…and no, I don’t like their corks either.

I think some producers won’t want to do this as some will think it will only create arguments. Who is responsible for the wine? I think that is short sighted, but I’ve had conversations with producers who think a little heat exposure is no big deal. “Little” could be days. As a consumer I’d pay for the heat button option if it were available.

Look at how many threads there are about possible heat damage during shipping. There’s one currently about Aubert shipping to AZ. If they all used Warm Mark tags, like Saxum, there wouldn’t be a question. I’m surprised someone hasn’t done the research. Put some tags on some bottles. Ship them in cardboard and styrofoam, under various weather conditions and see if anything happens. Better than fretting about the circumstances and wondering of your wine got cooked or not.

I am not sure that wineries/retailers would see that as a value to their businesses, as opposed to a mechanism for creating more unhappy customers. How many bottles experience heat that would trigger that tag yet are happily consumed by buyers blissfully unaware?