I agree it seems very unlikely that shipping from NY or NJ to CT in November would result in freezing.
Perhaps you have a tracking number for the shipping…if so, you should be able to access the ship dates and then check the temps during that period. That would help confirm/deny that it occurred during shipping.
But, from the pic, it looks like one bottle is in good shape (the bottle on the left). Maybe there’s damage that you can’t see in the pic, but even if it’s minor it’d still make a great gift…esp since some sort of damage to wax capsules is common. And you could drink the other two for Xmas dinner. Come to think of it, I might open some Chablis for xmas dinner.
it’s possible that the bottles were already in that condition before they sent them to you. Were they listed as pre-arrival when you ordered them? If that was the case, they could have recently gotten them in and someone turned around and sent then to you without inspecting the bottles first. It happened to me with wine i ordered from a local shop, which I trust. I couple bottles showed signs of heat damage and when I brought them back they apologized and told me that they had just gotten them in and just kept them in the box without looking at the bottles since I was picking up the entire box.
I found the tracking info. Low temps were 34 along the route. It didn’t dip into the teens until the following night. So it looks like it would have been hard for the damage to have occurred in shipping from NYC to Hartford. However, I have a really hard time seeing how the damage could have happened after our receptionist on the 21st signed for the package. It just doesn’t get below freezing in a professional office suite.
This leads me to the same conclusion as Jim - the bottles must have been damaged prior to shipping. Oh jeez, it will be an interesting discussion with Morrell Wine on Monday.
I could gift the leftmost bottle and serve the other two - that was my plan when ordering. Any likelihood that the wine is damaged without knowing how long ago the damage occurred if it occurred prior to shipping to me?
Why is cold the only suspect here, if it’s in the 30s outside I’m sure there’s a heater on in the building. Maybe it was next to a radiator or another heat source?
Sorry, I’m a noob - could heat damage have caused the corks to come out like this? Other than tasting the wine, any way to tell if heat or cold is the culprit.
Quick extreme temperature change will cause corks to push. If the wines were 30-something degrees from sitting in a cold truck, then go to a 75-degree office, a sudden 40-degree shift could easily pop the corks.
In extreme cold, the wine will freeze and expand, pushing the cork out. In heat, the air in the headspace expands, pushing the cork out. When the liquid returns to a normal state it is likely that oxygen has been introduced into the bottle and spoilage starts.
Sorry Poppy, that’s not true. The volume of wine in the bottle doesn’t depend on how fast the temperature changed, only what temperature it gets to. 75 isn’t enough to expand wine and push out a cork, unless it was filled at a much lower temperature, without much/any ullage.
Freezing does cause wine to expand, by about 9% relative to liquid water at 60 degrees. Water also expands with increasing temperature, for example by about 0.5% from 60 to 90 degrees. That expansion with increasing temperature is the main reason corks leak or get pushed out with heat, though the increased pressure in the gas head space also contributes. The air doesn’t expand, it’s pressure increases. In a heated bottle, if the liquid didn’t expand, the gas pressure would increase only marginally (for example, by about 6% for a 30 degree temperature change between 60 and 90). That’s unlikely to move the average cork. Not sure I understand the oxygen comment. If the cork is pushed completely out, then sure. but if just a little way, as in OP pictures, I wouldn’t be concerned about that.
But one lesson to learn is that freezing is much more likely to push out a cork than heating, because of the much greater liquid volume increase.
I didn’t see how much time there was between when you ordered it from them to when you picked it up.
Is there a lot of wine in the shipper? If so does it have an off color or does it look older?
You ordered from Morrell, solely my guess, but they’re pretty big. They probably have an off site packing/Shipping/warehouse/receiving/fulfillment center to fill you’re order. They packed it in foam and set it in a ‘wait to be shipped’ area. That area is probably their ‘cold storage’, which the majority of the time is warm enough to keep things from freezing, they probably even turn the inside temp off (in these areas) to save money when it’s cold, they took the risk of it being in styrofoam and being ok. Well it froze and so did your wine.
What else makes sense?
Either it was shipped to you this way, which I can’t imagine someone would put wine into a shipper this way. So it was damaged in the shipper, did this happen pre shipping or during shipping? If you say average temps were 34 and it went 2 states just doesn’t make sense that it happened during shipping. It seems that it happened pre shipping, which would mean to me that they packed it and stored it for shipping and the damage occurred then.
What were the weeks temps before they were shipped to you?
First:
Ask Morrell to either replace or accept return of them, they should pay shipping.
If for some obscene reason they do not replace or return them:
Did you use a Credit Card, and which? AMEX has Return Protection on most cards, between $300-500 per instance within a certain period, up to a certain amount a year. Other vendors also have this.
Although, I am not sure if wine is covered, but it may be.
David,
Let me sum up this thread for you in a quick synopsis.
Your wine was either heat damaged, cold damaged, or had angry corks just trying to escape from their prison to which they were driven into. Please politely call the wine shop you got said bottles from, send them the photos if needed, and ask nicely how to proceed.
I don’t see how the weather in November between NYC and CT could have caused this, even if the bottles were left out in the weather for a day or two. It does not seem to have been cold enough, for a sufficient amount of time for a magnum to freeze. There are a few 8 to 12 hour dips below 32F, but it doesn’t seem like that would typically be sufficient. Nor does it seem to have been warm enough to have caused the wine to heat up enough to cause this sort of damage.
The one possibility that comes to mind is if the bottle got lost and accidentally went somewhere particularly cold (or hot).
My suggestion would be to hunt down that shipping info, and see what it says about when the wine was shipped, and any locations where it was tracked.
One point about temps: because of the alcohol, it takes temps in the low 20’s to freeze wine. Furthering the point that it seems so unlikely that it froze between NY or NJ and CT in Nov.
It could have frozen prior to shipping…in that case tho, it would most likely have been last winter and folks along the supply chain passed along bottles with raised corks. Could happen, but seems unlikely.
To me, the more likely scenario is that it got unexpectedly cold when the wine was in your building’s storage area. Might be hard to really confirm/deny any of these scenarios tho.
The wine being unaffected by the cold is good news…tho I wouldn’t store/age the bottles with pushed corks long term tho, since the cork seal was partly compromised. This isn’t an issue with the one bottle where the cork didn’t push of course.
Let me add my voices to the chorus that’s saying there’s something fishy here. It sounds like your shipping conditions were nearly ideal and nothing that you should need to worry about. My vote is return all bottles, because:
This may be a real possibility. I’ve seen this before, someone placed a box of wine under their desk next to their computer. The heat fan in the computer.,over the course of a couple of weeks caused huge heat damage to the bottles. It was a disaster. Popped corks, leaking. Nasty.
Paul, if the question is could there be more extreme localized heating on one side or part of the bottle if set on a radiator, then maybe. But just taking a bottle in from the cold and putting it in a 75 degree room isn’t going to harm it in any way. All that will happen is that the bottle and its contents will gradually heat up to room temp.
In general, it’s probably best to check any shipments of anything asap after arrival in case there are any issues that require contacting the shipping party.
Good news. Morrell Wine has 2 magnums left so they will replace the two bottles with the corks that have breached the capsules. They will pick the originals up for return. I got the impression that if they had three they would have replaced all of them. As they did not, I will take a flyer on the leftmost bottle and open it for the holidays. A happy ending - thanks for the input everyone,.