Leaving wines in vehicles 24/7 (except cold season)

There are many times when I would go out to eat at a restaurant or to a friends’ place and wish I would have brought my wines from home. So I started to leave young wines that are ready to drink in my vehicle 24/7 (except for winter when temperatures get too low). The wines are kept in a 42qt. refrigerator in my vehicle. Wines I usually store are sparkling wines, Bordeaux, rhone and burgs (reds).

I was wondering if anyone else here tried this or still do. What are some obstacles you have encountered if any?
Or any other input you would like to share?

The constant vibrations from the car would be the thing that would concern me over time.

Good point but I wonder if young wines that will be drunk early on would exhibit any difference.
I will try a blind test with ones from the vehicle to ones in cellar.

42 quart refrigerator in your vehicle, Ballin’.

Why not just bring wines from your home when you are going out to eat or going to friends?

Jonas Tofterup wrote his MW research paper on travel shock on an aged, full bodied red wine and found little effect of travel shock (one of the treatments was the wine spending a whole day in a car being driven about). You can find the paper here: https://www.mastersofwine.org/rp

A 2008 paper suggests there is some effects to wine exposed to vibrations over longer period of time: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889157508001178

I’m not sure at what level of exposure the vibrations start becoming an issue. Those two papers suggest somewhere more than a day and three months for red wines.

There’s various beliefs around travel shock and it’s effects. And there is very varied anecdotal examples from folks on the board around the subject.

Ultimately though, the only thing that matters is if you and your friends taste a difference, and find it to be an adverse one. The best thing to do would be as you suggested run an experiment with some bottles and run triangle test to taste yourself.

Sometimes it is unplanned dining out. Spur of the moment.

I am fascinated by this; can you say more about your setup?

We don’t have secure parking (let alone an EV), so leaving anything in the car is something we avoid.

And I think my friends and family call me crazy! Props to the gentleman who ALWAYS has the right bottle for the occasion. To you sir

Thank you for the dose of reality.

That said, to all the shock talk, EVs vibrate less, right?

Certainly there’ll be less/no NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) from the drivetrain, particularly since EVs don’t do gearchanges (unless you have a Taycan), but there exist ICE cars these days that are refined enough to be indistinguishable from EVs with respect to NVH

You have a refrigerator in your car? Do you have a bed in there as well to crash after you’ve drunk your wines (that are in the car) and a sink to rinse your glasses in? Pretty cool!
I could think of a lot of other things to put in there as well to make it like a real home.

+1 you have an actual fridge? (Not a cooler/yeti kind of thing)

I keep wanting to run an experiment with a bottle of white wine on a paint shaker for 24 hours. My bet, let it rest for 24 hours and you’ll never find travel shock. Same thing with a young red, maybe give it a few more days to settle.

Your only issues with having wine in a car are temperature (which your fridge handles) and sediment from sloshing around.

This is my Jeep. It has a Dometic fridge in it powered by solar. I usually only carry wine on a trip, but there is usually beer and water in it daily. There are times I stop by a shop to pick up beer, wine, or food and then have another stop afterwards. The fridge comes in handy.

Even if I carried wine daily, I would not overly worry about the vibration so long as it was young. I would be carrying $20-40 bottles for random drinking, not collectibles. Good wine would only be in the fridge for a specific trip/dinner.

I keep a small 53 degree cellar in my helicopter and haven’t noticed any degradation of my younger Screaming Eagles compared to those I keep in my underground lair.

Error, double post.

Nice setup! I like!

I wish I did have a bed, kitchen and bathroom.