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I mean, you’re agitating the bottle by opening it. You’re also agitating it by taking it out of the wine cellar and climbing stairs. Is there a difference between driving across town and driving across country? What about flying versus driving? Would a vibration dampening box help during a drive or shipment? In theory you could test it by taking two bottles from the same lot and having one flown across the country and back, then blind tasting both. I find it profoundly unlikely someone could identify the shocked bottle, but I’d be happy to see someone try to prove me wrong.
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not, so I’ll answer seriously - no, I haven’t noticed any detriment from a 15 min Uber ride across town with bottles held carefully in my lap.
Mind you, I still take care to double decant off sediment beforehand, where appropriate, or better still drop off significant bottles a few days to a week early.
I honestly really don’t care if travel shock is “real” or can be explained scientifically or is all in my head (or in my tastebuds, and the palates of those I drink with). Nor do I care if I could identify the bottle blind against another that didn’t travel. That’s an experiment, albeit potentially an interesting one, not a real life situation. I only care how my wine tastes to me and those I share it with. The wine doesn’t taste as good to me, or my husband, if we open it soon after lengthy travel, so why do it? Why increase my chances of a bad experience? I’d rather have a great experience and I lose nothing by waiting. There’s no downside at all for me. When we travel, we take delicious, young, modest wines which we love. Or we ship ahead. I’m not telling anyone else what to do with their wine or imposing my views on others.
My theory (taking no view whether the theory is right or wrong) is that temperature is the driver and agitation is the catalyst. Seems like low-hanging fruit for a MW candidate to test and write up.
My uber rides to offlines sometimes take over a hour. The wines still show well. There’s a lot of jostling on these socal freeways too!
So no more splash decanting?
Think what the blender trick must be doing to those molecules 
I wasn’t being facetious. The concept is that repetitive resonant frequencies would cause changes; presumably ground travel of any distance could cause it or is it specifically from air travel?
So pobega away in the late fall or with Fedex cold chain?
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I’m conscious about not obsessing too much about the small stuff when it comes to wine, so if it is delivered or purchased that day and I want to try it, I’m team Charlie in that it goes into the wine fridge until it either needs to warm up or cool down further.
I think the human body - and brain - is far more fallible and variable than a static, chemically stable liquid.
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I can’t reconcile how opening a bottle and swirling it in a glass is different than it moving in a bottle while in transit. Is there any scientific testing that shows a change in composition? I would think temperature is a bigger variable in enjoyment but I have no education on it.
It’s intriguing so would love to see some studies
Depends on many factors (listed above). My personal opinion is that it depend on type of wine/region, age, and most importantly (again for the wines I have seen, thanks M. Goodfellows for posting about this on the boards) the type of closure, wine makers style (reductive, amount of sulfur, etc) and for champagnes’ perhaps disgorgement date (if it is close to the time you are opening the bottle). I have a preference against Diam and other synthetic closures as they seem to need some serious time - 2-6 months to allow the sulfur to integrate.
If it’s Diam - for it to show best 6 months (min 2). Others, 2-4 weeks seem to do the trick assuming it’s not a bottle meant to age before drinking.
I totally agree, Sarah. Just because something may not be scientifically provable with existing methods doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And why not make the effort to try to make the experience of a wine the best that you can? When I was ITB, I tasted a number of wines in France at the domaine, after shipment (in temp controlled containers/trucks), and then after a month or two in the warehouse. It was obvious to me that many wines are noticeably less effusive and are tighter right after being shipped. But if people don’t believe it…that’s fine. I’m not telling them what to do, just relaying my experience. And if they don’t believe it, I’d suggest opening that bottle of Champagne as soon as it arrives on your doorstep…you’ll only lose about 1/3 of it. 
Young unfiltered “natural” wines can stand a little rest, as I have found out. Then do the same process you recommend above for older wine.
And many people in the trade agree with you. I trust this perspective, because it’s observation based on multiple tastings of the same wine. It’s similar to the fact that ITB often realize when there is low-level TCA in a wine that is missing its normal fruit, even though no one picks up TCA itself.
Just because we don’t have an explanation for travel shock doesn’t mean it’s not true. A lot of human knowledge is based on careful observation. Not every truth is susceptible to laboratory proof.
In the 2017 “The myth of travel shock,” William Kelley quoted a very interesting post from 2009 that lays out possible scientific explanations, and described a relatively controlled experiment for travel shock:
Jeff Pf0h1 wrote:
Travel shock.Yes it exists.
Chemical kinetics can be altered with temperature, pressure and motion (vibration). You can slow some and speed others depending on which variables you play with. Some are REVERSIBLE, and some are not.
(temperature is generally not reversible)High frequency vibrations, as they exist in transit (cars, planes) do push some reversible chemical reactions faster and stop others completely. Luckily, unless you subject wine to high frequency vibrations for days, the newly made chemical compounds resulting from the high frequency vibrations are not stable and will revert back to their pre-ship state (almost). Older wines suffer more than younger and need more time to recover and don’t recover as completely (fewer active chemical compounds). A few hours is about the amount of time needed to induce travel shock. A drive across town will not do it to a noticeable (taste/smell) effect. FedEx easily, even a cross country trip via air.
LOW frequency, like hiking with wine in your backpack, does not induce such reactions. Well it does but you would need low frequency for WEEKS, some believe months. (cognacs shipped around the world for instance, but they also expose those to temp swings so…)
One test that me and some friends did was ship some bottles, and handcarry others from France. Identical bottles from the winery. We’re talking cases to remove any bottle variation. Noticeable differences in taste/smell existed when they were all back in the USA. We ran some GC/MS because we’re geeks and saw measurable chemical differences. But after 6 months all the wines became chemically similar again (within our measurement abilities and statistics) with GC/MS.
That said, in view of all the earlier threads…
Next time I see you I’m going to do an experiment.
Without letting you know which is which, I’ll take a bottle, pour some wine into a glass and pour some into the blender and then put that into a different glass.
I’ve been doing this once in a while lately just because I didn’t believe the story by Myrvold. Besides, a mutual friend suggested it as he’d done it as well and I didn’t believe him either.
The blender will warm the wine a bit, so you need to account for that - you can put the glass in the freezer for a few seconds or warm the other glass, and it will make bubbles, but those go away pretty fast.
After ten minutes, you can’t really tell the difference with most wines.
You can if there was a lot of sulfur, and in that case, shaking the bottle actually helps sometimes too.
Shaking is a mechanical action. The things that affect wine are chemical actions. Other than shaking up sediment, which I understand, it doesn’t seem that a bit of shaking will affect the chemistry of the wine.
Here’s an article in which they studied the effects of high-frequency vibrations on wine. They found some changes in acid and in alcohol composition. But they looked at the wine over a period of months, not hours or days and I’ve not seen anything further that’s dispositive.
Varies dramatically for me based on the circumstances. A bottle sent from California via FedEx/UPS (whether ground or air) had a much rougher ride than a specially organized wine shipment in a refrigerated truck which I then go pick up in my personal vehicle from an offsite storage (and keep in an insulated bag on the way home since it’s 2 hours)… or even a bottle that’s lived an offsite storage for months that I go pickup in my personal vehicle.
When traveling internationally, I try to pickup wine at Duty Free in the last major airport I hit.
When this thread is finished, maybe we can revisit topics questioning whether wine glass shape or size makes any difference, or whether giving a wine air, or decanting, improves a wine…
And what about Bottle Shock? Has that been discussed?