Was thinking about when a wine reaches its apogee, would it be possible to hold that wine in place. My thought was if you could hold it at just above freezing temp maybe you could save it as long as one wished.
…but would this unnatural process of the accepted rate of aging @55 degrees be offensive to the curve? (And accepted community values)
This a bit of a cross post from a thought I had in the Napa thread.
Could also be useful if you have a lot of bottles that are near end of drinking window and you are running out of time to drink them. Will this buy you more time?
I’m not a chemist, but you would have to get it cold enough that there would be no reactions able to take place. I think even at freezing, decay reactions would still take place even if the solid state would limit interactions. So absolute zero?
Such an interesting question - and one that probably deserves more research.
Anecdotally, I think we’ve seen a few instances where this has been ‘successful’ - think of the wines that have been discovered from shipwrecks that have remained in cooler waters and how they are still shown some life.
As I pointed out in the other thread, my short term research (8 months post pressing) certainly showed that certain markers of development - anthocyanin ‘loss’, creation of polymeric pigments from the binding of anthocyanins to tannin molecules, etc - were truly ‘stuck in time’ with low temperatures (5 degrees C). I did not have the luxury of pushing these out longer but it would have been interesting to do so.
One would think that it would be impossilbe to slow all chemical reactions with cold but not freezing temperatures but there truly seems to be a research paper here for someone to look at.
I often advise folks purchasing my wine that if they like a bottle exactly as it is now to store it in a regular fridge instead of a wine fridge.
Lower temperatures do slow down evolution, so technically yes, you could slow down considerably wine’s evolution by keeping it at just above freezing temp. Not indefinitely, but slowing down the evolution considerably.
At least if one considers oxidation (primarily of alcohol to acetaldehyde) as evolution - the pace at which oxidation happens is positively correlated with temperature, so the lower the temp, the slower the oxidation.
However, one should keep in mind that lower temperatures can alter wines in other ways. Different compounds have different solubilities at different temperatures. An unfiltered wine might throw a lot of sediment if their threshold of solubility is reached when a wine gets too cold. The same thing happens with tartaric acidity if the wine is not chill-filtered - tartaric acid drops out of the solution as wine crystals, reducing the wine’s acidity and raising its pH. This means that chilling a wine at too low temperatures might change its chemical composition considerably and irreversibly.
Lower temperatures also bind more SO2, so the amount of free SO2 that basically “protects” the wine from oxidation decreases as well. So while one might slow down the pace at which oxidation happens, one could also make the wine more vulnerable against oxidation.
Finally, different chemical reactions happen at different paces. What we consider “ideal” aging of wine happens at around 12-16°C (54-60°F), because normally at these temperatures the oxidation of alcohol to acetaldehyde happens at more or less the same pace as with other chemical changes that happen as the wine ages. The velocities of these changes might start to diverge below the optimal aging temperatures, meaning that the pace at which the color of the wine changes might suddenly be very different in relation to eg. oxidation of alcohol to acetaldehyde, or esterification of acids, or polymerization of tannins, etc. All these reactions will most likely happen at a considerably lower speed, however. So while the wine might evolve slower, a wine that supposedly ages at half the speed at low temperature might be after 20 years of aging quite different compared to a same wine aged for 10 years, even if they are supposed to be the same at their respective ages. A sort of apples and oranges problem, but with a temporal dimension.
That’s correct if you wish to truly “suspend” development altogether. However, actually freezing the wine poses some significant uncertainty as to whether or not doing so would ruin or damage the wine. At the same time, as a practical matter, simply reducing the storage temperature significantly (e.g. from 58 degrees down to 38 degrees…or even 33 degrees), should theoretically cause the wine to age drastically slower than it otherwise would. Bern’s in Tampa stored their wines at 44 degrees, and even today have very simple wines (Cotes du Rhone wines from the 1960s, Frankenwein from the 70s, etc.) that drink shockingly well today, not something you’d expect of a 60 year old wine with (typically) very little ageability. Similarly, for years they had bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy from the 1920s-1950’s that drank amazingly, and that would likely be vinegar in a normal-temp cellar. I’m thinking you’d at least be able to greatly extend the peak drinking window, even if it’s impossible to suspend forever…
There was a very famous case of this. A significant amount of old Bordeaux (late 1800s) was forgotten in the sub-basement of Glamis Castle, IIRC rediscovered in the 1960s. The temperature in the sub-basement was about 40 fahrenheit year-round and there was a stream running through it. The wines were completely undeveloped, looking tasting and smelling more like 10 years than 80.
What I’d like to know is whether suspending development is possible when wine has already undergone 15-20 years of development in normal cellar conditions, sort of to stop any further aging and keep it at supposedly perfect peak. Perhaps the chemical composition that allows it to survive for 100 years in low temperatures isn’t there anymore after classic cellaring, thus making certain characteristics out of whack as someone else mentioned.
No one’s mentioned Bern’s, but supposedly their cellar is kept unusually cold, and there are no lack of reports of quite old wines that seem relatively youthful.
But purely from a theoretical perspective, what you propose should do a pretty good job of slowing down the development substantially, no matter what point along the aging curve the wine is at.
Otto gave a good answer, also think that most of the chemical changes would proceed at such a slow rate that any residual aging processes would not produce much different results (mostly just slower). In principle it could, just don’t think it would be a huge effect over a number of years.
Chemistry is still chemistry, starts before wine is bottled, continues afterwards until you wouldn’t recognize it as wine. Some things happen quickly and are mostly finished, the aging process involves many, many slower reactions (ones with high activation energies that slow down at lower temperature).
Thanks for pointing out Otto’s post. The point that, even if whatever reactions taking place are altered in rate differentially, they will be slowed enough that the impact is minor is the key.