Hah!, everyone knows a Ribera del Duero could go through consecutive plane crashes unscathed.
-Al
Glad you posted this. Over Christmas/ NYE I travelled with a case of assorted fine wines to my parents place and was very concerned about travel shock. Wine was in a cardboard box and upright style styrofoam packaging, flying in the cargo hold. The only bottle that was muted all weekend was the first bottle I opened a few hours after we arrived, which was a 2018 petit cheval. It probably just needed more time in the bottle or more air. No complaints and felt like we debunked that for myself.
I think that MW dissertation has been discussed before here. Several problems come immediately to mind; firstly, I believe he used wine under bark cork, which means that there is a known, fairly high degree of variability in the bottles before transport, as anyone who has tasted a bunch of bottles of the same wine eg for a tasting can confirm.
Secondly, any discussion of shipping shock from a US POV refers to ocean freight, which is to say a sea voyage that lasts from weeks to a month or more. His experiment concerns short air freight trips, and has nothing to say about the experience we have here. I would be very interested in an experiment that touched on ocean freight, using any consistent closure.
Oliver, I know we differ on this topic. Have you ever considered having a case of wine, which you are also shipping by sea, air freighted over (or hand carry back with you), then compare them at various times after the sea shipment arrives?
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If I recall correctly, there wasn’t any real discernable difference between the groups. Therefore, the fact that bark cork can have variability is null and void given the results.
Also, included in the samples was short air freight along with ground transit, which I would think is what most of us have have questions about. Of course it isn’t the HIGHEST level study, but that would be awfully time consuming and expensive to be able to control all possible variables. However, I feel that the results and the way the study was set up was far from anecdotal and compare same lot bottles under the different conditions we often times have questions about. If the results returned major differences, that would be one thing, but all groups were blindly similar. For myself, it gave me what I consider to be useful information.
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I’d love for an ardent shockist to submit to a blind tasting to try to spot the bottles that just traveled. But I don’t think any would do it, and we all know what the result would be.
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I posted this in the other thread discussing the same study:
“These results contradict the popular anecdotal view that wines suffer sensorially from travel shock immediately after travelling. I could go as far as to suggest that we blame a wine for not tasting as it should after travel when in fact it is not the wine but the person who is in ‘shock’, tired after travelling, or regretting the end of the holiday. That said, this experiment needs to be repeated, as results could have been different if another style of wine had been used.”
My experience over decades flying long distances with Champagne is either the wine or I suffer from travel shock. I’d like to see a study that focuses on Champagne, rather than still wines. It isn’t controversial that air travel changes palate perception; airlines season foods differently because of it.
I am agnostic about whether it is the wine or me that suffers from air travel. The distinction doesn’t matter because the result is the same and I don’t drink Champagne after flying for a day or so.
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Alan, we have tastings of newly arrived wines maybe every two weeks, to make sure that they are showing properly; some unpredictable proportion of the wines don’t show well, so we don’t release them until we are satisfied. We don’t release the wines and use shipping shock as an excuse, we just don’t sell them until they are showing properly. We burn a lot of samples every year doing this. I don’t have any doubt about this necessity, so I have no motive to spend yet more money on an experiment. I don’t know of any importers who doubt the existence of shipping shock.
Note that we never find more than maybe a quarter of the newly arrived wines to be affected. Tofterup appears to be suggesting in some places that his dissertation proves that shock doesn’t exist, which is obviously not the case.
My offer remains open: any Bay Area berserker who is sufficiently geeky can join us for pair of tastings about a month apart, to see for themselves. Just let me know and we’ll invite you the next time we do it.
I recently had a strikingly clear example of shipping shock. Maybe two months ago we tasted a newly arrived 2022 Lugana, a wine I drink quite often, and it was showing very poorly, thin and fruitless. I tasted a second bottle a few nights ago and it was excellent, exactly as I had hoped from prior vintages. Under screw cap, which removed one variable. Tofterup describes the difference very well, oddly.
what you described happens all the time for many wines for various reasons, some of which are mutually exclusive but most not. given the variables, it’s inherently complex. to pin it so confidently and conclusively on shipping is completely illogical.
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Hardly. Given that it was the same bottling of the same wine under screw cap, the only variable was time.
Well, time and the lunar calendar. That’s anecdotal, though.
Okay, that’s perfect.
I’d love to try this. Not sure how much of a disadvantage it is never having sampled the wine at the domain itself.
Not much, I’d say. Other than the domaines are in picturesque parts of Italy…
Send me an email, Alan, and we’ll add you to the scheduling email for the next tasting, oliver at omwines dot com.
Of course, Sod’s Law requires that all the wines we taste will show perfectly right off the boat. Good for business if bad for my argument.
Well, then he can become your good luck charm.
-Al
Wouldn’t the proper comparison be between the same wines that arrived a month ago versus the ones that just arrived a week or two ago, served blind, to see if (a) the tasters can pick out the new arrivals and (b) the new arrivals are worse?
Don’t some wines arrive more than at a single time?
Tasting a young wine a month apart, nonblind with the idea of travel shock in your mind, trying to discern the difference from memory, doesn’t seem to prove much or anything about travel shock.
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Does so-called “travel shock” apply in Europe or is it only in North America?
Depends where you start. More west you start from, the wine will age as you travel east. Then get younger again as you go back west. If you start from Asia, wines will either stay the same or get younger as you travel west. 
In Europe, the wines have no sulfites . . .