So let’s assume my cooler is running and the wine is sitting at 58°F.
Then let’s say the cooler breaks down and the wine starts to slowly rise in temperature over the course of a few days (large mass of wine in insulated cabinet) to the ambient temperature of 70°F and sits that way for a week.
Then the cooler is fixed and the wine slowly returns to 58°F over the course of a couple of days.
The question is what’s the impact on the aging curve of the wine?
Obviously this isn’t devastating, but is it negligible? Does it push the wine forward by a few weeks? A few months? A few years?
Maybe, but I’ve seen people talk about how temperature change actually impacts the wine more then a higher constant temperature over time. So this is a fairly rapid temperature change higher and then lower over the course of a couple of weeks. Not like passive cellars that may rise and fall a few degrees over the course of the year.
Worthless “conventional wisdom”. Why would the rate of change in temperature be more important than the temperature histogram over time? Is there a difference in the aging curve? Yes. Is it something you would ever notice? No.
Btw I had this happen before. I had a little 16 bottle wine fridge that I didn’t realize was unplugged for ~2 months. This was like 8-9 years ago. ambient temp was ~70. Once I noticed l plugged it back in. I opened some of those wines (09 Dom Perignon, 01 Trapet Chambertin, various Yquem, 08 Lignier CDLR) in the last 6-12 months and they were exactly how I expected they’d be. I still have some of the bottles, I’m sure I’ll keep some for much longer (bdx) and I’ll let you know how it goes. I doubt it will even be noticeable.
Btw idk how you would know if a wine had aged 4 weeks; I guess you could try comparing it to one of the same bottles from your offsite if you wanted to sacrifice some wine for science.
I would think about it in the sense of the total life span of the wine. You’re talking about a minor ~10 degree difference for like 0.2% of the life of a 10 year bottle, 0.1% of a 20 year bottle. Would you worry about that bottle of it had sat in a retail store at 70 degrees for a week, a month, 6 months?
What you’ve described is still pretty slow given the thermal mass in the cooler. 58 to 70 for a week is less than 84 degree days. That’s less than a degree F over a quarter year. Absolutely negligible.