I don’t think that’s universal practice. I have a veteran ITB friend here who won’t pour a lot of imported wines unless they’ve been here for at least several weeks, and I think Oliver McCrum has said the same thing.
I’m I’m also sure it varies with the wine.
But this subject has been beaten to death. As I said, I consider it very significant that people in the trade – who taste the same wine repeatedly at different stages – will incur the cost of inventory for a month or so so that the wines to show at their best. I also think they are probably the best positioned to experience the problem.
I was already travelling with a bunch of wine, so adding one more to my wine luggage was pretty easy. The way I saw it, either way I had open slots for wine in the bag and I had to check that bag on the way back, so I might as well do a little experiment while at it.
It seems it doesn’t occur after ‘traveling’ to bring a wine to a restaurant.
Seems like the travel involved in going to our local tasting group doesn’t cause it, either.
So, there must be some certain amount of travel that is required to induce this shock. How far can you drive a wine before it gets shocked?
(I don’t speed aerate, but would the people who use a blender for aeration of their wines be inducing instantaneous travel shock?)
When we travel, I will make sure the wines we bring have time to stand up and settle and spend a little time at the desired serving temperature, but that’s about a 24 hour thing, to me.
We will take wine on 10-12 hour drives to get somewhere and drink them the next day and I don’t perceive travel shock. (We take relatively ‘old’ wines, as well, and haven’t perceived a difference, but it would make sense that old wines with sediment might require some recovery from travel.)
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I saw this on a wine blurb…“Bottle shock is a temporary problem, easily resolved by allowing your wine to rest prior to drinking. How long the wine must rest depends on factors including grape type, bottle size and storage conditions. While the settling process can take up to three months in some cases, a wine can clear up in as little as eight weeks. Choose a cool, dry place to store your sick wine during the rest period.”
I don’t buy into that, but it seems their is a whole statistical spectrum of belief!
In the Tofterup study he also included a set of wines that just took an 8 hour car ride instead of air travel. While no differences were found from a sensory perspective, there was significant reduction in free SO2 levels for the wines that travelled via air. The theory goes that due to the vibrations and in and pressure changes, air travel affects wine very differently than ground transport.
The paper is worth a through for those interested and is available for free on the MW website. There’s many other papers that are fun read, so for the geeky minded it’s worth having a browse through.
Tofterup actually did three treatments, summarised below:
T1 – wine airfreighted two months before tasting
T2 – wine airfreighted 2 days before tasting
T3 – wine spent a day in a delivery truck 2 days before tasting
Here’s the table summary of average FSO2 levels across those treatments:
Both of the air freight wines had significantly less free SO2 than wines that did not travel by air. Though the wines that were airfreighted 2 months before tasting had lower FSO2 levels than the wines airfreighted 2 days prior, it seems Tofterup found there was no statistical significance in that difference.
Maybe. That’s been one hypothesis that’s been thrown around for a while. Everyone but me in my data set did not travel prior to the tasting. I had just arrived from Portland the day before. I did two sets of triangle tests and got them both wrong (I am taster 2 in the data).
I’m eager to try this again, but preliminarily this would suggest that I can’t spot the difference, or at least the me that has just travelled can’t tell the difference. Selfishly I want that to be the case, because it means I get to travel much more confidently with wine and open it soon after arrival.
I’ve stopped flying with Champagne to be consumed shortly after air travel because I had too many experiences when Champagne tasted dull. I’ve commented about it here when the subject comes up for discussion. I have also stated that the negative affect of air travel may be to the Champagne, me, or both. Aside from stirring up sediment, I’ve not had the same problem with still wines. Nor with travel by car.
It’s worth pointing out that bottle shock and travel shock are two different things. No one doubts that bottle shock occurs (wines shutting down after bottling). The controversial one is travel shock (wines shutting down after shipping)
How many explanations of wine behavior are rigorous? Winemakers are often the first to say, “We don’t know,” and the first to make suppositions based on observation of their wines.
Sure, there is lots of superstition and imagined experience, and no shortage of poor tasters. But the ITB experience is not unlike that of someone who bought a case of wine and has found a bottle or two were off in some way – no clear flaw, but not like the others. Short of some lab test (e.g., for TCA below human detection levels) there’s no “rigorous” explanation – just the observation of an observer experienced with the product. In both cases, the observer has come to know the wine over time and spots an anomaly.
Much of science operates like that. Think of botany or animal behavior. It often starts with acute human observation. That’s even true of grape identification. I recall Mick Until saying his primitivo vines look very different from his zin, even though are genetically indistinguishable. We shouldn’t hold wine up to the standards of physics.
