stupid question...

C

Cristian Dezso

Cristian Dezso
I had a case of Barolo shipped - although I requested otherwise - from NY to DC this week, and it spend one day in transit in Baltimore when the high was 83. All bottles seem in perfect shape. Still, I ask myself whether I should return it. Is there any scientific evidence on the likelihood that the wine is ruined?

TIA, Cristi
 
originally posted by Cristian Dezso: Is there any scientific evidence..
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I don't think you're going to get much scientific evidence on this one. Just a lot of strong emotions. :)

For what it's worth, a high of 83 means that it was more likely to be in the 70s for most of the day. Which is not so bad. Although the real important information is where exactly the wine was, i.e. sitting directly under the sun in a convection oven or in a refrigerated truck, etc, and I don't think you're likely to get that information.

If you really wanted to have it returned I'd guess that since your instructions were ignored you might have a case.

So, no scientific evidence. Just pontification.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
Were the bottles warm to the touch when you opened the box? If not, then probably fine.
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Well, they certainly were not cold, but neither did they seem overly warm. But they were delivered at 10AM after spending a night in the 50s. So I am not sure if the temperature at delivery time is indicative of what happened the day before.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
Were the bottles warm to the touch when you opened the box? If not, then probably fine.
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Usually. Unless they heated up to 95F in the heat of the day, and then fell back down to 65F by the time you got around to opening the box.

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
The day may have been 83F but the climate inside the styro may have been much less.
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Usually. Unless it was sitting inside the near-perfect blackbody (wink) of a UPS truck, in full sunlight.

These kind of borderline cases can be tough. Since there are no pushed corks or signs of leakage, that puts you in a weaker case to make the case for return or replacement, were you to decide that was prudent. In some previous, similar cases I have pulled the foil off one bottle and inspected the cork with a 500W halogen for any sign that the wine has pushed up between cork and glass. Although how soon this happens is ullage dependent, of course.
 
Barolo is the toughest red wine in the world.

I can't prove this empirically, but it's my firm belief. I've had fifty-year-old Barolos that had had most of the color leached out of them by poor storage, age and abuse and god knows what else and were the color of wan iced tea, but were still charming and vivid and complex.

It's anecdotal evidence, but it's mine and I love it.

Of course, rubesco is crazy tough too, but it's a niche market.
 
originally posted by Chris Coad:

Of course, rubesco is crazy tough too, but it's a niche market.
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You're not kidding. I've got a bottle of 1975 Lungarotti Riserva that I've been carting around to BYO wine dinners for the past two years and nobody wants to drink it. We wind up opening Burgundy or Barolo or Behrens & Hitchcock and never seem get around to the Rubesco.

-Eden (alas, maybe someday the heathens will allow themselves to be led out of the woods and into that enlightened kingdom that's the result of eno-diversity)
 
Bring it to NYC. I've had a few Rubesci -- served a particularly muddy '73 that Chris may recall -- and would be delighted to give that bottle its due.
 
originally posted by gregory dal piaz:
Bring the rubescoBring the damn rubesco
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Hell, I'll call you guys the next time I'm in town. I also have a bottle of 1985 Barolo that comes wrapped in a burlap and instills an inordinate level of fear in people who ought to be intrigued by such mysterious packaging. Is it just me, or do other people have particular bottles that they drag to dinners and that never get opened? The Rubesco has probably been brought along to over a dozen dinners and it remains unopened. I had a bottle of Kalin Semillon that suffered the same ignominy as the Lungarotti. It eventually found its audience and was amazing.

I'm trying to get back to NYC in the fall, so maybe we should do a wine orphan jeebus, with everyone bringing the wines that their friends don't want to drink. It'll either be brilliant or an absolute disaster.

-Eden (even VLM passed on popping the Kalin)
 
I had a '64 M. di Villadoria that was wrapped in iuta. (It also had a wax stamp on a string that was stapled directly into the naked cork -- no lead foil. Weird package.)
 
I read this statement today on another wine board:

"The more I taste older wines the more I am absolutely convinced that Nebbiolo is a variety that must have as cold a cellar as possible to evolve gracefully, especially in warmer vintages such as 1998."

This was written by someone who drinks an awful lot of nebbiolo.

While perhaps not a direct contradiction of some of the opinions stated in this thread, it does contain a more than a kernel of dissention with them. At the very least it proposes the corollary that warmer, riper years create wines that are less sturdy than the classic vintages.

Which is hardly novel; these warmer-vintage wines develop and come around into drinking windows sooner than their classic brethren. So it seems to extend logically that they'd sooner show signs of premature development, or even falling off when exposed to poor (i.e., warm) storage conditions.

But, I don't think I'd ever heard this notion expressed specifically about nebbiolo.
 
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