Young wine / no sediment - no issue at all…
Old wine - no issue if u can decant for sediment… If you are lugging it on a flight and immediately open it upon landing, that’ll cause an issue for sure.
Same for me, and I take wine with me for travel all the time.
I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence for travel shock from anywhere, and it would be very easy to test — taste bottles that just arrived blind against bottles that arrived a few months ago. Does anyone want to bet me any money whether they could discern? I’m not really a gambling guy, but I’d put up big money on that.
Anyway, the idea has a strong hold on the imaginations of wine geeks, we’ve argued this many times, and people can do whatever they want.
I thought the whole game was to have the wine bottle opened before the delivery truck is out of view?
When you double decant, do you find restaurants are generally willing to open wine that has already been opened? There’s only one restaurant in town here with proper wine service, so I’ll bring a bottle by early afternoon and ask them to decant it per my best guess from CT, but other than that I generally just bring “pop and pour” bottles to other restaurants. Curious what your experience has been…
I thought you were going to say you were going to shake me! Or put me in a blender!
You’ve just assumed away the question, which is whether and how mechanical actions affect the chemistry.
Couple hours to a day depending on time and day of arrival.
If I am buying back vintages I may actually let them rest a few weeks.
You’ve just assumed away the question
Seemed like the best approach!
More seriously, I wonder if people know how wine is sold at the wholesale level. In Manhattan, it’s dragged around the streets all day long, taken on subways up and down stairs, and shaken to smithereens. Then sometimes those same bottles are taken out the next day and the next.
The people buying for restaurants and stores make their decisions after drinking wine that’s been shaken cruelly and without mercy. There’s no other way to do it.
In other parts of the country, the wine might be driven about in a car, but it’s still hand carried in and out of places and shaken quite a bit.
If the vibrations really had a noticeable effect, I would think that the cumulative shaking for a few days would be noticeable.
Travel shock isn’t a thing: Travel shock in wine: Myth or reality - Decanter
I’m on the “no wait for young wine, a week or two for old wine to settle” team.
60 days fro under 5 year old wine, 90 days for everything else
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The consumer gets squeezed here. Retailers like Los Angeles Wine Company say no returns after a month or two. But if you didn’t like the wine in that window, it’s your fault because you opened it during “travel shock.”
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Pobega all the way.
Generally between 5 and 60 minutes…
Sean
I remember years ago someone did this with a couple of wines. They shipped a bottle of each across the country and back, then a small group tasted them alongside bottles of the same wines that had not been shipped, blind. If I remember correctly (and I’m pretty sure I do), people had a slight preference for the bottles that had been shipped.
That’s a pretty conclusive analysis. The SO2 data was interesting.
This is a touch drift-y, but I’m also always puzzled by people who advise letting an old wine stand up for a week to ensure all the sediment settles before opening.
The laws of physics dictate that, like, 90%+ of the sediment will settle after as little as a few minutes, right? And 99% of the super fine stuff after an hour at the outside? Is an extra six days really going to make a difference?
The MW study quoted a bit earlier had the control as the lowest ranked of the wines tasted; the recently flown wine was the highest. They didn’t do a direct comparison (only 4 way) but my guess is that the difference in perceived quality between the recently flown and control may actually have been statistically significant.
That’s not true at all. It varies a lot by the grape type, and the amount of sediment, but mature cabernet sediment takes at least hours to settle out, and nebbiolo sediment is extremely fine and can take a week or more to drop out.
Cabernet sediment isn’t so bitter; drinking off the dregs of an old cabernet or Bordeaux (say 20+ years) can, in a positive way, freshen up an old wine that’s been decanted an open for a couple of hours. So you might not have an issue drinking a 15-year-old cab with a little sediment stirred up, though it would influence the flavor. Nebbiolo tannins, on the other hand, are extremely bitter, so you want to avoid them at all costs.
I’ve had mature red Burgundies that were very cloudy and bitter after being carried on the subway and given only a few minutes to rest before decanting. They were totally spoiled from a drinking standpoint. Pinot sediment (I’m thinking 20+ years old, again) seem quite fine.
Syrah sediment tends to crust on the inside of the bottle like Port, so generally there seems to be less of it floating in old wines if they’re carefully decanted or poured. Still, I wouldn’t want to stir up the suspended sediment in my mature Hermitage or Cote Rotie.
I think that’s a bogus hypothetical. Most importers don’t provide samples to retailers until the wines have rested several weeks (because they know from experience that wines often don’t taste right immediately after shipping), and many hold back deliveries until the wines have rested. That’s expensive for them. If they hold them a month, that’s a lot of working capital tied up in inventory. It is manifestly against their economic interest to delay deliveries – unless they’re convinced that the cost of serving wines that don’t taste right is even greater.
I suspect that we need to focus more on what wines people are talking about. If it’s a new release California wine shipped to LA, it may not have been in transit long enough to suffer much.
For European wines, it generally takes about six weeks from the time a wine is ordered until it’s ready for sale in NY. The time would be longer to the West Coast. Unless it’s a mass-produced wine, it’s consolidated with other wines (in Bordeaux, Dijon, Milan or whereever) on a container. There’s a fair deal of export paper work (tax exemptions, etc.). The container goes to a port and then rides on the ocean for a week or two or three (depending on the number of port stops). Then it sits waiting for US customs clearance and is trucked to a warehouse (or two or three). So they’re subjected to much more high-frequency vibrations over a longer time.
With older wines, the story is even more complicated. Not only do you have sediment, but the preservative elements such as tannin are reduced, and the complex chemical reactions of aging are well underway or complete.
So you completely dismiss the experience of importers (including Sarah K) who find that their wines don’t taste as they should when they’ve just landed but that they recover after a few weeks, and hold them back until they’ve rested even though that delays revenue?
I’m as skeptical and empirical as anyone, but it’s a fallacy to think that the only knowledge is obtained by blind and lab tests. If that were the case, we’d dismiss most of botany, and much of agriculture. Hell, my contractor and the guy who runs the paint department at my local lumberyard have a boatload of incredibly valuable knowledge gained by experience and close observation. (E.g., a satin finish highlights flaws in the painting, while eggshell doesn’t.)
The fact that people in the trade delay deliveries is highly probative in my eyes.
confirmation and anchoring biases are powerful things.
They also an extremely convenient, not to say presumptuous, way of dismissing testimony that doesn’t accord with your own beliefs. One might even say that anyone who invokes confirmation bias to support his or her own claim, with no evidence that it is operating other than their opposition to the testimony, is suffering from it.