The evidence and science is firmly on Michael’s side. Wine does not change chemically with movement or vibration at anything approaching a regular land/sea/air method of conveyance, assuming temperature does not swing wildly. There is no objective evidence for travel shock.
There IS evidence of human fallibility, error, variance etc when it comes to tasting and perception of wine, in spades.
Yes they do, but not because stirring in itself causes chemical reactions, but to keep a solution properly mixed, which helps facilitate reaction. Same reason you stir your polenta while cooking. But the stirring doesn’t cook it, the heat from the stove does.
Bingo. You could write this on any number of threads about travel shock, glass size and shape, pretty much everything associated with wine tasting.
Not sure one Decanter article on a mediocre, mass market Spanish wines is really going to tell us anything.
We just referenced a very well designed research study that found no significant difference in blind tasting and chemical analysis with 12 experienced tasters. I guess the next step would be to repeat the same study with travel shock proponents as the tasting panel; maybe like the judgment of Paris people they’d disbelieve their own conclusions.
This is the the train of thought for every conspiracy theory known to man. The more appropriate approach is to recognize that, while we can’t understand everything about complex systems (particularly when human senses and psychology are involved), if there isn’t some reasonably understood mechanism to support something, it doesn’t make any sense to invoke the “we don’t understand enough to know this imaginary thing isn’t true” argument. It’s the basis for the anti-science movement, and it’s dangerous.
Ok, so believing in travel shock, or biodynamics, or the tooth fairy, is pretty harmless, and isn’t going to hurt anyone. But the tendency to believe those things, when extrapolated to other, more important issues, can hurt people. Which is why I always push back on even the harmless, foundationless beliefs that circulate. Because if people aren’t in the habit of thinking critically about the little things, they’re more likely to do that about the big things.
Read my post that John Morris linked earlier.
With regard to bias, it is indeed a well-known phenomenon. One would think the best application of the knowledge that it occurs would be to hold one’s own beliefs with somewhat more circumspection. Amazingly, I never find it to be applied that way.
Although the Decanter article you site says that the tasters could not determine a difference, it did, in fact, find a chemical difference having occurred for one form of shipping. I have no idea whether it is relevant. Here is what is relevant. Travel shock is so widely a recorded phenomenon that before one decided that it was mass hallucination, one might consider starting with the hypothesis that it exists and try to design experiments to explain how it might occur. These would, of course, be chemically verifiable experiments, not tasting panels. And one should remember that the fact that a given experiment failed to produce an explanation would only show that one still didn’t know the explanation for the phenomenon. It would not show the phenomenon did not exist. You could rightly object that you can’t scientifically disprove the existence of something given those criteria. You would be right. Lot’s of things that are true cannot be scientifically proven. Such is our condition. Some of them can and the means by which they are should make us all more, as I said, circumspect about our beliefs in other cases.
I don’t doubt that people THINK the wines taste different in a non-blind environment. My point was that if that’s the case, they should be able to identify the travel shock wine blind, compared to the control they claim should taste better.
Not sure why it’s a controversial statement that if you claim wines taste significantly worse after travel that you should be to identify the worse tasting wines blind. It’s interesting that the expert panel actually preferred ALL the wines that had traveled, no matter what type of travel, to the control.
I think wine has been demonstrably and objectively shown to change with large swings in temperature, which is the only thing that seemed to occur with the shipped wine in the Decanter article. I don’t think anyone would argue that huge change in temperature, especially higher, does not affect wine, and usually for the worse. I’m actually not surprised that people preferred the “shocked” wine in that case because it seems the cork allowed more oxygen which possibly lead to a “mini decanting” in bottle, making the young wine perhaps a hint more developed and/or open upon pulling the cork.
To Michael, it is controversial to dismiss the testimony of large numbers of people as bias, because you don’t agree with it unless you have much stronger warrant than anyone has shown on this thread.
To Sean, the article did not state that the wines that had changed due to air shipping had experienced higher temperatures.
To both of you, insisting that the tasters preferred the wines that had traveled is a classic case of proving too much for your position since it might be taken to indicate that the wines had indeed changed and these tasters preferred wines made–let’s say–more austere by transport. I am not saying that that is what happened. I am saying that if a tasting panel shows change but not the preference you expected, that does not show that change does not occur.
Michael–I just actually did read the study, and per my reading, the study, contrary to your statement, showed very clearly demonstrated differences in the chemical composition of the wines that travelled vs the wines that did not. The tasters were not able to reliably determine a difference. So my conclusion after reading the article is that travel differences (“shock”?) clearly occur, at least with this particular wine, but that the tasters were not able to tell a difference in a statistically significant manner, again with this particular wine. I’m puzzled as to how anyone can generalize this conclusion to claiming that travel shock does not occur.
It proves they believe it, not that it’s correct. Businesses and industries have acted on beliefs that proved incorrect all throughout history.
You can’t prove a negative. I’ve never seen any blind tastings that confirm the existence of travel shock, and every blind tasting I’ve read about comes to the exact opposite conclusion. When I see a bunch of blind tasting panels where people pick out the recently-shipped bottles as being inferior to the others, even with only a moderate level of correlation, I would be open to considering otherwise.
As to the oft-made point about the practices of people in the trade, I do allow that there could be a difference between (1) customers receiving bottles from the winery or a retailer via UPS or Fed Ex, or people having taken wines in the cargo hold of the plane with them on a vacation, versus (2) the months-long journey of newly released bottles across the ocean, through warehouses, distribution and onto retail shelves. Maybe the latter, on such young wines, has some effect that I would not have observed as a customer. Or maybe the wines just aren’t quite at their best yet at such an early point.
Anyway, we’ve been around on this before, and I respect your views on it, even if we disagree. It certainly doesn’t affect me any if other people feel the need to keep their wines still for months before opening them.
Really, the only reason I toil in these threads is that I’d hate to think people out there reading this board for information would be afraid to take wines with them on travel because of this. Bringing a case of good wine in the Wine Check on your vacation, enjoying them with your dinners and on the patio, is such a great pleasure, I’d be sad to think people are missing out because of this, or having to overpay for mediocre wine from the supermarket at their vacation destination because of it.
I absolutely agree that bringing along good wine when you travel is a great, great pleasure. For the record, even as a “believer” I would never counsel someone to give up bringing wine. We still take wine on every trip and enjoy the hell out of it. My advice is only that someone perhaps consider before traveling with older or delicate wines, or with special bottles where you only have one and are invested in it showing its best. Or better yet, experiment and see for yourself.
In Native Wine Grapes of Italy, D’Agata states that DNA tests show Vermentino, Pigato and Favorita are genetically the same, but the winegrowers of each strongly disagree. He mentions one grower who planted two different varieties side-by-side and they produced noticably different wines.
Mick Unti of Unti Vineyards says the primitivo vines they imported from Italy are very different in characteristics and appearance from their zinfandel, even though they share the same DNA.
Not quite sure how this is relevant to travel shock, though I guess these are cases where observation is important because theory doesn’t help much in practice.
To me, the following passage implies some kind of cork retraction and expansion on a very small level, and that seems to be due to atmospheric changes:
However, to my surprise, the wines that had been air-freighted had significantly lower levels of free SO2 (2-3pm) than the controls and the wines that had been transported by road. They also had higher spectral absorbance at 420nm, which indicated browning. This strongly suggested that a small amount of oxygen was absorbed through the cork while it was being air-freighted.
I don’t think rattling a bottle of wine around would cause the integrity of the cork to change. I would happily admit otherwise if there was proof!
The concept of travel shock is that wines taste worse immediately after travel when compared to controls, and they would taste better after resting them. The study shows that they don’t.
The study demonstrated that the wines transported by air had lower free SO2. The levels were lower for the ones that had been rested ~2 months after travel.
That’s a totally different concept than travel shock, suggesting that traveling with the wines at all makes them permanently different, no matter how long you wait, and the data suggests that there would be no difference between drinking them immediately after flying than waiting.
Also, it suggests this DOES NOT HAPPEN for wine transported by ground, which is the vast majority of the wine people are having shipped, ie, the entire point of this thread.
In the long previous thread about shipping shock that John linked to above, I was talking only about the shipping I do as an importer of Italian wines residing in California, which is to say ocean freight between Livorno and Oakland, which takes about a month. The MW thesis doesn’t address this. I have no opinion about any other kind of shipping because I have very little experience of any other kind of shipping.
The liquidity of our business is not great, which means we have a powerful motive to sell wines right off the container. We do have a bias: towards selling the wine, not storing it. But we find that wines tasted immediately after shipping sometimes taste very different from the same wines tasted in Italy, which means that we won’t be giving our customers a good impression of the wine if they taste it or drink it. If there is a difference they are always worse, and the difference is always in a similar direction. After a few weeks or a month the wines recover. Then we start showing them.
This difference in taste is only apparent if you habitually taste identical lots before and after shipping. If you do not do this you are in no position to judge whether it’s true or not. I have never seen the Mona Lisa, so I have no opinion about it.
Many interesting topics in the study of wine are not clearly scientifically understood. To say ‘I don’t understand this phenomenon, so science dismisses it’ is Dr Science thinking. The only interesting thing about wine is what it tastes like, really; the instrument used to ‘measure’ it is fallible but that’s all any of us have.