An anecdotal study of travel shock in wine

WINE TALK
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Not to jump on the bus too aggressively, but I sent you an email. I think this would be fascinating, and @Alan_Rath it’d be great to meet you in person too; I think we’d have many things to talk about.

I still don’t have a complete opinion on travel shock. It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s ok. I am reluctant to discount people’s experiences without strong alternative explanations, and I am very much open to the idea that something could be true despite not yet having a known causal mechanism.

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Europe is the size of like Ohio, so I don’t even think it’s possible.

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I look forward to it, Ben. I will respond to your email.

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The people are probably the biggest variable. Treating people tasting wine like some kind of machines that will produce consistent results on different days, and with absolutely perfect memory of results from previous days, seems off base to me. Plus, you have no controls.

Edit: Chris made pretty much the same points.

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I also don’t know of any who have tested it in any meaningful way. Belief is not proof.

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I never bring wine with me when I travel. But wine travels to me all the time.

As mentioned earlier then I have often opened bottles travelling across Europe, only hours after receiving them. Never found them to show worse at a higher frequency than other things I open.

Makes a lot of sense that the people travelling and not the wines are the factor here.

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107

Doug,

Human variability is part of it, of course, but unless you’ve come up with a Dr. Science wine-tasting machine, there’s no alternative. It’s a general problem with wine, in fact; there are a number of accepted ideas about wine, especially fine wine, that are essentially unproven, and may be unprovable. Examples:

  • older vineyards give better wine, generally.
  • soil type is connected to wine flavor, eg with volcanic soils or granitic soils. (The hard science is that drainage is the only soil variable.)

People who taste/drink a lot of good wine tend to believe both of these things, because their palates suggest they are true, but I have never seen proof of the kind you are asking for. Does that invalidate these ideas? If not, why not? Shipping shock is the least of it.

The only useful tool for analyzing fine wine aroma and flavor is the human head, inconsistent as it might be. And we don’t even know how smell works, scientifically, if I understood The Emperor of Scent correctly.

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This is the same myth as the one that wine needs hours and hours (or even days!) of air to show its best.

Glad to see it debunked.

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So you believe a young wine tastes the same without air as to wines that had plenty of air? Or am I misunderstanding your post?

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The original theory was that lesser and older wines travelled poorly. Lesser here means wines from less famous regions or places where the alcohol was low,like Switzerland. On the other hand, that could have been the fact that when people are in Greece or Switzerland having a great time, they think the wine is great…but when they get home…

The cause was supposed. to be ship vibrations. It seems to me that the variables are so multiple, reports are so different …can we ever know?

When I sold wine retail, we ordered 100 cs of 1972 Tollot Beaut Chorey Cote de Beaune. When it arrived and i tasted it …oh oh! I started to work on my resume…all the while blaming the taste on travel shock. A month later it tasted great…phew!!

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111

Actually, France alone is five times as large as Ohio (248,000 square miles vs. 48,000) and Germany is nearly three times as big (138,000 square miles).

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First off, I appreciate a little friendly debate, and many people I respect share your view.

I am on board that absence of proof is not proof of absence, but you are citing things as evidence that are in no way evidence of your premise. I am refuting them. If you had controls, such as tasting wines that had not been shipped recently alongside the same wines that had, you’d have at least somewhat meaningful results. Relying on tasters’ memory and consistency across different days is just too likely to deceive. I would be a lot more accepting of results from human tasters that did not rely on those things, especially if done blind and with something like a triangle test setup. I’ve read about very few people trying comparisons with controls, let alone those other systems. None have shown the differences some people claim. If some future tests do, I’ll happily change my opinion, but right now, you believe something with no evidence at all (in my opinion) and not even a plausible technical explanation that I’ve seen (unlike below).

There are reasons to think older vines are likely to produce different fruit. They grow differently, yield differently, and their grapes can often be compared to grapes from younger vines in the same vineyards, at the same time. While there can be differences for other reasons, such as differences in soil and slope within the vineyard, my understanding is that people who do these comparisons (including during and after fermentation) find certain differences most of the time.

I think there’s evidence that drainage, pH, and microflora in soil all impact grape character. At least a couple of hose factors (maybe all 3) are fairly well established. As for volcanic soil, for example, producing some set of characteristics that can be recognized in a blind tasting, I don’t believe it. (I should clarify that I mean across different regions and grapes; volcanic soil in one region, with a given single or dominant grape variety -such as Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley-, probably can give certain likely characteristics.) Maybe lots of granite or limestone give certain likely characteristics (even across regions; within a region such as Burgundy or Muscadet seems pretty well established), which is not surprising given what is known based on science.

So, I don’t think either of your examples shares the lack of evidence that I see for travel shock. I also think both are nuanced, and we can believe they have impact without going so far down the marketing rabbithole to think “volcanic character” actually exists (again, worldwide; I do think it exists within certain regions, even if it won’t be totally consistent).

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Here’s some interesting reading:

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I don’t think Oliver is trying to prove anything, he’s trying to run a profitable business and has empirically found that some wines don’t show well when they first arrive, so he holds them back. It affects the cash flow to store the wines rather than moving them, so it wouldn’t appear to be a pet belief of his driving the decision.

-Al

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The bolded line implies that you give no weight to the tasting memories of people in the trade like Oliver (and Mel in his example above) who taste the same wine repeatedly. It’s those observations by many, many people in the trade over decades that carry the most weight for me. That and the fact Al notes that it’s against their financial interests to delay release of wines for many weeks after arrival.

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Sure, it’s against their financial interests, but there are likely other biases going in the other direction, such as (just one example) mentors or other respected people who believe in travel shock.

I didn’t mean to imply I give no weight to their tasting memories, unless maybe you mean specifically with this topic? Good importers have to do well with this, in order to select good wines. But whether or not a wine is muted and then is fine several weeks later is a lot different than comparing one producer’s wines with another’s, as just one of many examples of how importers use tasting memory (as well as good retail wine buyers, sommeliers, and other people in the trade).

People have a tendency to believe things that aren’t true because our in-group believes. Other people’s belief in something, absent of any meaningful evidence (I understand we disagree on what is meaningful), is just not a rational reason to believe that thing.

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Doug,

I don’t mind a debate at all, I’m with you.

I am not saying ‘absence of proof is not proof of absence,’ I am saying ‘the only evidence I am concerned with is that provided me by my tasting experience.’ There is no contrary evidence that I am aware of.

‘Relying on tasters’ memory’ is what a wine merchant does. You don’t have to believe in it, but it’s much of what we do, not to mention that it’s what wine judges and journalist do, and indeed any fine wine drinker that drinks a wine and says ‘I like this more than the similar bottle I had last week, but less than the third one I had 6 months ago.’ Sometimes we can assemble groups of similar wines and taste them blind, but this is often not possible; most of our judgements don’t have ‘controls,’ or a scientific basis. You appear to be suggesting that any opinion formed outside of a blind comparison of like wines is invalid, which makes no sense.

Most of the differences that matter between fine wines are not capable of scientific analysis, other than eg defects. We send a lot of wine to ETS for analysis for defects, but there is no meaningful way of scientifically analyzing the differences between eg a producer’s Bourgogne Blanc and their Bâtard. It’s all down to the Mk. 1 Palate.

The only practical aspect of any of this is
a) for us, we don’t sell shocky wine, because we think it’s a waste of time and not in the interests of our producers or our customers, and
b) passionate wine drinkers, might want to wait a month or two before drinking a fine bottle if you know it’s been shipped recently, since most importers don’t wait to sell the wines. Don’t risk wasting your money, in other words.

On the other uncertainties (soil drainage is as I mentioned not controversial), if you take the Oxford Companion as a reasonable source of mainstream scientific thought, you find for example: ‘The relationship between soil chemistry and wine quality and individuality is in the main poorly understood.’ My tasting experience leads me to think that the soil makes a difference beyond just drainage, but there is no hard scientific basis for this that I am aware of. Soil pH is one of the fascinating differences between the Nebbiolos grown in the Langa and the Alto Piemonte appellations, but AFAIK it’s not ‘fairly well established,’ and the Oxford concurs.

Anyone who has tasted a wide range of wines from the south of Italy and who is naturally curious will wonder about the relationship between the striking soils of eg Etna and Vesuvius (or the Canary Islands) and the particular character of the wines grown in those soils. That we don’t know of any scientific way those flavors can express themselves in the wines does not cause me to doubt my tasting experience.

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To be clear, I applaud Oliver’s cautious approach. He’s taking the more difficult route to ensure the wines he imports show as well as possible. I’ve written here, and elsewhere, that the science I know does not support the idea of travel shock, but I freely admit that there could be factors I haven’t thought of, or that there are more complex phenomena going on. Either way, it’s one of those things that, at worst, does no harm, so those who think travel shock is a thing should take the steps that make them comfortable with their wines.

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Speaking of Italy, I listened to the IDTT podcast on the wines of Lake Garda area, and was fascinated by the discussion of styles, geology, winemaking methods. Do you import any wines from the area?

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Two things I’d add:

(1) if a brand new release isn’t showing well but then is better in a month, that isn’t necessarily because of travel shock. It could just be the very early evolution of a newly-released wine, something to do with SO2, or something else.

So waiting a bit to put the bottles on the shelves may be the right decision, yet that doesn’t mean that it proves travel shock. The way to know if travel shock is the actual cause would be to try the wine that came off the boat last week with the same wine that arrived a month or two ago, blind. But I keep suggesting that and nobody will bite on the suggestion.

(2) Even if, hypothetically, you did my suggested blind tasting a number of times and concluded that the transit has indeed affected the wine, that would not necessarily mean anything as far as how consumers use the information, i.e. not taking wines along when they travel, not opening wines that arrived in UPS in recent days or weeks. It could very well be that the months-long process of newly released wines going from trucks to ships to trucks to warehouses affects wine, while UPS arriving from K&L or you checking the Wine Check onto the plane for your three hour flight do not.

It’s not at all hard to imagine that those two very different things, if in fact either one had any effect on wine, are not equal or similar to each other in that respect. .

I disagree slightly here. Yes, it doesn’t affect Chris or Alan if other people choose their behavior around incorrect information, so I agree about that part.

But it does affect those other people. I think it’s sad when people say they won’t bring nice bottles from home on vacation because of travel shock, and they end up spending time and money on their trip searching around to buy plonk instead of having great wines from their cellar. It would be great if more tastings like the one in this thread helped people to realize they can do that, and take away the confirmation bias when they drink the wines on their travel.

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