+1
VA and alcohol burn will be more noticeable at room temperature than cold. Colder wines will be less aromatic and ‘easier to drink’ - which is why those folks that tend to be bitter averse tend to drink all their wines cold, whether they are white or red.
Hope the OP comes back with more info/insight.
Cheers.
Actually no. Wind chill only affects living things like animals and humans, things that have flesh that can feel temperature.
I used in quotes for that reason. It’s basically just a correction to account for the increased heat loss from convective forces (wind). Wind Chill as it’s used in weather reports simply gives you a temperature adjustment based on the wind speed, ambient temperature, and average human body temperature. Just replace human body temperature with wine temperature and you’ll get your “wind chill” for wine.
Unless of course, you’re a wind chill expert and would like to further educate me?
You are correct that the contents would heat and cool more quickly to the temp of the ambient air due to convective heating or cooling. However, wind chill is the perception that the air is cooler than it actually is, due to the convective air flow. My point was that if the air is blowing out of an evaporator at 48º, that is as cool as the bottle is going to get (it may get their more quickly), and 48º is not going to damage your wine. A human standing in front of the same evaporator might perceive the temperature to be maybe 40º depending on the speed of the air.
and the other thing about doing it while nude.
There are some wines (usually the backup sample of something I have already reviewed) that sit on the floor of my office for months that experience wide fluctuation in temps and when I open them, the corks look fine and I can’t see much difference in my impression. Over analysis usually creates more questions than it answers.
When I sold bottles, the French government made us use more and more cullet–broken recycled glass-- so the dead leaf tint got darker. We said this was done in order to protect the customer from light struck wines. Usually this is more of a problem for beer people. Think Miller’s in clear bottles. It can happen with wines, esp Sauvignon Blanc in clear bottles …of course in most fridges the light goes off when you close the door.
Did the humidity get checked?? A dry environment can lead to the cork drying out and that is no good.
I’m surprised that there is no mention of vibration on this thread. If the cooler has excessive vibration when the compressor is on, that might affect all of the bottles in the cooler. I don’t have any experience with this, but the topic of vibration does come up here on WB from time to time.
BTW, has the OP tried the test bottle of Alpha Omega yet?
What impact would you expect the vibration to have, beyond disturbing sediment?
I don’t really have personal experience with it, but it is a topic that is brought up from time to time on message boards and elsewhere.
Here is what Decanter magazine has to say about it:
“Vibration can disturb sediment present in the bottle, but it also causes complex chemical reactions which are less visible. Vibration (and the resulting increased kinetic energy in the bottle) leads to a decrease in tartaric and succinic acids, causing a reduction in esters, which dulls flavours.”
This is why I only cellar and consume ace of spades and mer soleil unoaked Chardonnay. Can never be too careful about light damage.
I’d love to see some actual research that says this, because it seems extremely unlikely to be true.
I agree Alan. I suspect they’re just passing along received wisdom without evidence to back it up. Hard to imagine that vibration from a cooling system would impart enough energy to drive chemical reactions. But I don’t have any evidence either.
Here’s a thread with some evidence - to the contrary:
[quoteBy the way, I think these three Lonely Island songs for SNL (Dick in a box, mother lover, three way) are the funniest things they’ve put out in two decades. Justin Timberlake is sensational.][/quote] Word Up! Agree. 
The average velocity of the molecules in wine at room temperature is around 500 meters per second. The vibration has a negligible impact on the average kinetic energy, you’d affect it more with a tiny increase in the temperature. Oh, and if the vibration was increasing the kinetic energy of the wine molecules, it would manifest itself by an increase in temperature. That explanation is plain silly.
-Al
That was it! I am sorry for not responding. It was figured out, then life kept us busy and I haven’t been on many forums lately. Honestly, embarrassment probably played a part in it, too. lol!
I took a couple of weeks to experiment between freshly purchased wine and the wine coming out of the cooler. You and others were correct. We were pulling them out of the cooler, pulling the cork, and drinking them relatively soon thereafter. They were noticeably different than the wine from the store.
Long story longer, I started pulling the bottles from the wine fridge and setting them on the counter for about an hour before we were going to open them. That solved our problem. Everything was back to normal. The good news is that we only threw away a few hundred $$ of wine. Could’ve been much worse. AAaannd, I am glad I didn’t open any of the good stuff - as I was tempted to do, but the wife talked me out of it.
Thank you (and many others) for your help!
How cold is your cooler? I have never had this experience drinking wines straight out of a cooler.
OP says 47.8-59 degrees. I’ve had many reds that don’t show well right out of the cellar at 55-57.
While this is happening really fast, it does remind me that there was a time where I had a perfectly stored bottle of Bergstrom from 2006 that smelled like the tropicana coconut tanning oil…so much we were all laughing rather than crying. I too wonder about how the wines taste if you put one in the fridge and just leave another on the counter. I would certainly be bringing in a bottle or 3 to the local wine store to get some other local perspectives on this.