best practice for sure…having said that, reefers were extremely difficult to source last couple of years…we brought over lots of wine in blanketed/heat shielded and never had a problem but once. We used temp monitors and only got to 78 degrees internally after waiting 10 days in the Panama canal for ship transfer.
The effects exposure of wines to higher temperatures is pretty well known. I don’t think that’s the only variable at play though when folks talk about travel shock. For one, I think many who are big believers in travel shock are very careful when they travel with wine. I know I am and my bottles always arrive at their destination cold to the touch (in the next iteration of this experiment I may throw a temperature probe in my wine bag for some extra data). Second, folks tend to describe travel shocked and exposed to higher temps very differently.
While there’s evidence that short exposures to higher temps can cause some chemical changes in the wines, most studies with sensory panels seem to find that sensory wise there’s statistical significance between the wines (Crandles et. al 2015). For differences to be noticed from a sensory perspective you have to expose wines to higher much longer, at that point descriptors associated with cooked wine come out.
Thermal expansion and contraction can certainly be an impactful variable on wine, but I don’t think that’s the only one potentially responsible for changes in travelled wine.
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I don’t understand why champagne would be the most likely to suffer from travel shock. I would expect a wine with heavy sediment to be really the only wines affected, and that should be resolved immediately upon re-settlement of the sediment.
BUUUUUUUUUT I’ve been making fun of the travel shock dinguses for years (lovingly). Then again, my pet rock absolutely hates traveling back to the United States from Europe and Asia. Really kills him.
Chemically speaking, bottle shock is actually a very real, provable thing that takes place in the period after bottling as oxygen and sulfur interplay. Subject of a big AWRI study I’ve linked on this forum a number of times over the years. Bottle shock is real. Travel shock may have some anecdotal evidence, but those anecdotes are nothing to do with the wine simply moving a long way from one place to another. It’s either kicked up sediment, heat, or most likely changes to the person tasting from one day to another, or as they adjust from travel.
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It’s not uncommon for people to confuse bottle shock and travel shock as ideas, I think most of us have seen that happen a number of times, from medium-casual wine drinkers on up to real enthusiasts and collectors.
Certainly wines with sediment are likely the most noticeable, I don’t think anyone argues that sediment being stirred up affects a wine.
Many proponents of travel shock claim they often notice drastic changes with travelled Champagnes. There’s no particular hard data around the claim that champagne is the most drastic, merely anecdotal claims by many whose palates I trust and respect. So as a lover of champagne, I picked that.
Several studies on travel shock have found some significant chemical differences between travelled and non-travelled wine. Though those with DA panels have not found a meaningful difference in taste/aroma. I’m not aware of any long term (i.e. multi-year) experiment into this though. That would be interesting to see.
Even I’m guilty of this, in this thread none the less 
. Accidentally called travel shock bottle shock in my original post, but fixed it once I caught it.
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Just to complicate the issue:
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when I fly with wines they typically show well. Often they are consumed with friends within a day or two after the flight. (A lot of my friends look forward to seeing our wines, so I carry a case almost every time I fly)
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when I ship our wines to a distributor, I sometimes feel that they are not as expressive as they are in Oregon. I have no idea though how long it takes for them to fully bounce back, though anything back vintage usually shows well.
So I would at least consider whether different types of travel are more or less likely to affect the wine. I also feel that red wines are more impacted than whites or bubbles, but haven’t flown woth bubbles enough to have an idea.
Something shipped ground has been traveling for multiple days, whereas Seattle to Miami is 6 hours.
I would like to see those, and am curious, if that is the case, whether those chemical differences resolve. If the issue is mixture, as opposed to solution related, then they should. If they are solution related and cannot resolve, then the wine is travel damaged, not shocked. Just think how much better champagne must be in France. If there is no perceivable change in taste, then presumably we’ve got a placebo effect anyway.
How have you discerned this difference? Do you go taste your wines shortly after the distributor receives them? Have you ever tried comparing them side by side with bottles that weren’t shipped recently?
The study I linked to in my reply to Cameron (Crandles et. al 2015) as well the MW paper I cited in my earlier posts. There’s a few others as well I believe
A complicated issue indeed. There’s so many variables at play in all these situations it’s always tough to figure out what is truly responsible for it. I don’t think we’ll ever get enough data out there to satisfy everyone on either side of the travel shock debate.
Only thing I can think of is what happens to a soda can when you shake it
Why does a shaken soda fizz more than an unshaken one? | Scientific American.
But bottles aren’t being shaken during shipment. And whatever modest motion takes place in shipping, surely the carbonations has recovered to equilibrium after a few days/weeks of sitting around in a warehouse or retailer.
Assume you mean on a ship during importation? What about on the trucks taking the bottles to/from the ship or during loading and unloading? Probably still very different from a trip in an airplane.
Might ask the same about temperatures. It’s not just the time in the refrigerated reefer.
In my experience, as long as sediment isn’t stirred up, a car ride of up to 3 hours or a 6-hour flight don’t appear to have any adverse effect on still or sparkling wine. But I’ve never done any head-to-head comparisons and my palate may not be that refined.
Here’s an experiment you can do easily: shake up all the cans in a 6-pack of soft drink. Then open one each day for the next week and see how disturbed the carbonation is. I haven’t actually done the experiment. But people buy soda, put it in the fridge, and drink it within a day or two all the time. No one advises letting your soda rest for weeks before drinking 
But they do advise you not to open it immediately after shaking. 
Came across this article detailing a controlled study on the topic.
Glad that someone finally decided to conduct a trial of sorts. Having transported wine for many years, I felt some bottles showed very well while others I blamed on travel shock. I’m really starting to think the bottles that didn’t impress were simply poor examples to begin with. Would love to continue this discussion with thoughts about the study!
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Bingo! Finally, a nicely designed and executed test, with results exactly as expected.
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My favorite was a known importer telling me a cardboard smell in a Nebbiolo was probably travel shock from shipping and it needed to settle for three weeks…
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Are the bottles in the referenced tests traveling stored vertically or horizontally?
Once I lost the cork seal in an oldie travelling horizontally, I made the permanent change based on what I believed to be an increased liquid movement problem.
This could be useful in these experiments.