Possibly. But would you want your wine subjected to single-digit exterior temps for 12 or 24 or 36 hours? And it could be placed near the outside of the container. You have no way of knowing. The question isn’t whether there’s a decent chance the wine won’t be damaged; it’s whether there’s an unacceptable chance that it might freeze.
Someone here sent some temp sensors in styrofoam by ground a couple of years ago. I don’t remember the results exactly, but I think the upshot was that styrofoam isn’t as good an insulator as most of us assumed. Does anyone else recall the details?
If it’s the thread I’m thinking of, there may have been two of them unless one was on eBob, and they generated a lot of controversy.
One big problem with styro that I don’t recall being mentioned is that is isn’t usually used as an insulator so much as cushioning to prevent breakage. So depending on the specific styro configuration, you can have three inches of insulation, or only 1/2 inch of insulation. I think we’ve all rec’d packages with different styro configurations. Good point about the speed of the trains though.
I shipped wine from Washington to Minneapolis last week but the temps were in the low 40s in Minneapolis. As many have said it is a risk. Would not advise if it was expensive wines.
As I read that, after two days, the wine had warmed about half way to the peak temperature from its starting temperature – from 63F to about 83F with the outside temp reaching 100F at times.
If the physics works the other direction, with cold, a wine that started out at 65F and was subjected to overnight lows of 5F you might expect the wine to reach 35F after two days in styrofoam. With the antifreeze effect of the alcohol, you’d still have a margin of error.
But there’s one key difference. In the experiment, the overnight ambient temperatures were sometimes lower than the wine temp, slowing the warming. But in container or truck, the ambient temperature will always be a lot colder than the original temperature, so you’d expect the downward trend to be faster.
Yes, the styro took a full extra day to equilibrate to ambient temp compared to cardboard. For whatever reason people too that to mean that pulp was just as good at temp insulation, which is not what the data showed
I just approved shipping from St Louis to Maine ground service, to leave early next week.
to Larry Link, I am sorry about your experience, but in my opinion this is extremely rare, for the following reason(s):
YLee, you wrote: “Wine that has about 13ish% alcohol freezes around 20 degrees F.” This seems reasonably accurate (I would have guessed more like 15 degrees F), but here’s the question:
How fast??? The instant the temp inside the bottle is 20 degrees F? An hour later? A day later? A week later?
Heat terrifies me. Cold is a joke, except for rare unfortunate examples like Larry Link’s above.
Glass is an insulator.
Cardboard is an insulator.
Styrofoam, especially thick and dense enough to protect from breakage, is an insulator.
Even a goddam metal truck is (not much of) an insulator.
Really, I think the only danger would be something in a rail car being shunted to a siding in Cheyenne, Wyoming for a week in February. That happened once about 37 years ago to a container of California wine destined for the wholesaler I worked for at the time. I’m guessing that the wine sat below 0 degrees F for a week. The container arrived 2+ days after leaving Cheyenne. Parts of it were starting to thaw, there was a massive mess of broken glass and slush at the rear and on the sides. In the middle and front-middle of the container, there was plenty of wine in good condition.
Forties are fine. You only need worry about sustained temps below 20F, and when boxes are moving, they are not sitting and not sustaining, but like Dan says you don’t want these to be sitting in a boxcar on a siding rail during blizzards when cargo is not moving.
Not necessarily. From Northern California, if it’s on rail, there’s a good chance it will go over the Sierras, the Wassatch Range and Rockies via Reno, Ogden and Laramie at very high, cold altitudes. Same issue if it goes by truck: It would very likely be via I-80 along a similar path.
Even one of the two more southerly rail routes, via Flagstaff, runs at very high altitudes at points. You’d have to hope it went to SoCal and then through Texas and Louisiana, and there’s no assurance it would if it’s going by rail.
I wonder how they determine which route a shipment will take. My dad shipped had his last WineBid shipment out on Thursday, headed to me in upstate NY via FedEx Ground. So far, it’s gone from northern CA to AZ to TX.
Shipment was from the DC area to the SF Bay Area. The shipment was from a private individual, and I had authorized the shipment (and paid for it), so I did not go back to either the shipper or the seller, as it ultimately was my responsibility. I consider it an expensive lesson learned. The wine was 2003 Cos, and I drank the leakers within 4 months, and still have a few remaining that had no corks protruding nor leakage. The wines that I consumed didn’t taste flawed (other than the 03 Bordeaux flaws), but I didn’t want to risk holding them long term.
If it goes by rail, it will depend on which railroad the shipper contracts with, though I suspect that FedEx and UPS each work with the two main western railroads, UP and BNSF.
In your case, it looks like it’s traveling via BNSF, which has two main transcontinental lines – one from Seattle to Minneapolis and Chicago and one from Bay Area to SoCal, then east through the Soutwest to Chicago:
I also called them on Thursday for Friday shipment to NY, but I had mine shipped ground (scheduled delivery next Friday). It’s currently in Arizona. I’m not the least bit worried.
