How can I track the temperature along a shipping route?

WINE TALK
41

I have brought this up multiple times in the past, but several years ago I did an experiment. I took three each of three wines, and stored them in three different environments for two years. One group of three was kept in my 53 degree wine cellar. The next group was kept in the uncontrolled portion of my basement which had a slow swing from 52 in the coldest months to 70 in the heat of summer. The final group of three was kept in an upstairs closet in my (at the time) un-air conditioned house. The upstairs swing was from 60 in winter to 80 in summer. The 80 degree conditions lasted about 60 days each of the two summers.

After two full years I held a blind tasting. The participants found no appreciable difference between the cellar and basement bottles, and while the upstairs bottles were more evolved, they were not considered compromised/damaged by any of the tasters.

That’s obviously not shipping, but it certainly showed the wines (in this case a Muscadet, a German Riesling and a Bourgogne Rouge) to be more resilient than people expect.

42

David,

Thanks for sharing again. And exactly the type of stuff u love to hear about.

I am also of the opinion that wine is a lot more resilient then we give it credit for - with some caveats.

And I do hope folks actually read what you’ve written - interesting indeed.

Cheers.

43

Frozen fish, milk, ice cream, etc., is shipped in freezers or refrigerated trucks. Any damage is immediately obvious and the products are usually consumed very quickly, so damage will lead to immediate complaints and returns. And, as I mentioned, people are not buying ice cream on the internet and having it shipped across the country. If you order meats, etc., from far away, it’s usually shipped in styro with cold packs and shipping is usually overnight. If you ask for Fed Ex ground, you’re going to get spoiled products.

So if you’re willing to pay, you can have your wine shipped overnight, exactly the same way you’d have meat or cheese shipped.

But to expect that a single case of wine, or six cases, that are coming UPS or Fed Ex, are going to be handled by those companies as perishables and kept in cool conditions? That’s a bit much. It’s not the business they are in. They just move packages. They don’t specialize in food or perishable deliveries. If a shipper puts something that’s perishable in a box and and sends it UPS ground or Fed Ex ground, that’s on the shipper and the buyer. It would be cost-prohibitive for UPS or Fed Ex to set up cold storage at every facility on the odd chance that somebody someday might order a few cases of wine.

So if you’re really sweating it, then pay the extra and have it shipped overnight as a highly perishable item.

On top of that, as others have said and I’ve posted in the past, you have no idea what conditions your wine was in before you got them into your cool cellar. I can promise you that no wine has been kept in under 65F from the time it’s made until the time it’s at your table. Go to some of the top-rated stores in Manhattan and you’ll see pallets of wine on the sidewalk in 90+ degrees. Not for six hours, but for enough time that anyone on this board would be stressed. And few distributors, particularly the small ones, don’t deliver in refrigerated trucks. So best you can hope is that when the wine is coming from New Jersey into Manhattan and it’s spending a few hours stuck in traffic, at least the guy might have the AC on. And then it’s sitting in a store that is not kept at 60 degrees. Then it gets shipped to you and the only part of the journey that matters is that final shipping?

The reason wine is not treated like milk is because it isn’t milk. Millions of bottles are sold every year and there isn’t a big hue and cry about spoiled wine. And there are several reasons for that. First, as others have said, wine is a little more robust than people think. Second, shippers to take “reasonable” precautions, e.g. a lot of them essentially shut down shipping during the hottest months. Third, 99% of the population wouldn’t know if the wine was damaged anyway, including most on this board. Fourth, it would raise the price of wine and people would not like that. Finally, the current method seems to be working and nobody is going to solve a problem that isn’t apparent. There’s no money in solving theoretical problems and if there is in fact some damage, it’s cheaper to give one complaining guy a refund than to invest in new infrastructure to please that guy.

Do I have wine shipped in heat? No. There’s someone who’s pushing me right now to take delivery of a few cases from the opposite coast but I don’t want them sent until December. Then I’ll have them sent ground, as I’ve done for many years. After many dozens of cases, you kind of figure out that the wine will be fine. Only twice have I had problems and in both cases, the shipper immediately refunded my money.

44

A couple of weeks ago, I received a call that some wine was being delivered to my residence. All I could think at the time was, sh!t why is anyone shipping wine to Florida in September.

I had forgotten that Seven Stones was using a refrigerated shipping service, which is called Wine Vault. They use their own refrigerated trucks and claim door-to-door delivery with the temperature maintained at 55 degrees. The shipping cost for a six pack of 750’s was $45. Great experience, they even offer to put the wine directly in your cellar, I wish more wineries would use this service.

As a side benefit the wine is not placed in a shipper of any type, which I assume is because it’s not being tossed around by a couple of gorillas. There was just a tight fitting cardboard box around the winery box.

45

Unexpected BOOM!

My shipper has told me that UPS uses lots of trains for ground service transportation.

46

I thought this was common, or relatively common knowledge? My assumption is that anything moving more than a time zone east or west is doing so by train.

47

I’ve posted on a comparison similar to David Bueker’s, but with 3 cases of 1983 Prieure Lichine. Half was my father’s, stored from 1986 to 1992 in his basement that routinely got into the low-mid 70s in summer in NJ . The rest was in my temp-controlled cellar at 55-57 degrees. I inherited his bottles in 1992 and put them in my cellar. I was able to do multiple blind and non-blind comparisons over the years.

The passively stored bottles drank better earlier and worse later, consistent with the theory that higher temps accelerate aging. It was impossible to truly compare peaks in a blind fashion because they occurred at different times. Maybe the temp-controlled bottles peaked a little higher but I can’t say that there were dramatic differences.

But shipping involves a few days or weeks of exposure, not years. I can’t imagine that 70s matters, or even low 80s for a few days though I’d rather not chance it. High 80s and 90s I believe causes damage. If the wine itself gets that hot.

There’s no simple single solution as there are differences between wine shipped overseas in reefers and overland by train, plane, or truck, and there are multiple transfer points between winery and consumer where the wine might get hot depending on how it’s packed.

Importers, domestic wineries, and retailers each have a different perspective. Some don’t think there’s a problem: maybe they don’t believe or most of their wine is destined for short-term consumption by people who wouldn’t notice a difference. Cooked wine won’t give you Salmonella.

Some don’t see a cost/benefit in support of eliminating those points in the shipping process where the wine can get hot. Pallets sitting in the summer sun and heat waiting to be loaded for the next phase of the journey seems like an easily avoided risk. Unless you’re a shipper with a deadline and another load to haul.

And some may care but don’t think outside the local forecast. Or use fulfillment centers that don’t understand.

For those of us getting small shipments via FedEx or UPS, it makes sense to check the weather and use overnight or two day, avoiding weekends. Because as Greg notes, those guys just move boxes. Point A to point B is the extent of their responsibility.

48

Jason, a couple of posts made me think use of rail was not universally known.
I think it is safe to assume that rail is used without crossing a time zone as well.

49

As I understand it, UPS uses rail, but FedEx (Ground & Home) doesn’t. They use trucks.

50

Is there anyone here who would bet good money of his own that he could correctly identify those two categories of bottles in a blind tasting, at any age of the bottles? Frank, how much would you bet me on that?

51

I have a theory that we all spend so much money and go to so much trouble to store wines at “perfect” temperatures (and yes, I do it too) that we protectively adopt a highly exaggerated view of how much damage room temperature would do to wines for short and medium time periods. We need to believe it’s worth it, and that not doing so would lead to terrible outcomes, so we do.

You see this all the time in parenting, especially parenting young children. No parents are really certain what is the right thing to do about many things, and everyone is terrified that they might discover someday later that they did things wrong and their kids have some bad outcome.

So once they pick their course, they get very strident about it, really critical of anyone who chooses differently (“You are going back to work? I could never leave my kids all day with some strangers during these critical formative years.”), and feel really threatened when they see other parents doing things differently. Because it makes them doubt whether they made the right decisions.

Our wine collections are our babies to some extent, and I think we experience the same psychology. So much of what we do as wine collectors is motivated by fear that we’ll look back and have regrets – what if it was warm somewhere during the shipping, what if there isn’t enough humidity in my cellar, what if the temperature isn’t the right one, what if the bottle gets jostled and has travel shock, what if I store my wines upright instead of on their sides, what if there is too much light, what if I drink them too soon, what if I drink them too late, what if I decant too short or too long.

It’s very natural, and I feel those pangs of worry and doubt myself, too. But it’s good to be aware of it, as well, and to get out of yourself a bit to realize that your mind wants to race to overly dark places, whereas if you just use decent sense things will probably work out okay.

52

Sometimes a bottle is just a bottle…


…but usually it is a baby.

53

Great post Chris.

I agree completely.

[cheers.gif]

54

The old link is dead. It appears the company that produced it was bought. If anyone has a better source for temperature forecasts pales post here.

55

Not what was asked here, but once I found in a case (Liger Belair? nothing too fancy, village and 1er) a tracking gadget. With a QR Code to log in online where you could see the temperatures on route. So you could at least see ex post what happened and raise the issue.

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IMG_35733024×4032 2.32 MB

Photo is from an oyster shipment from Island Creek Oysters. Doesn’t help with freezing.