Heat damaged wine experiment

A few months ago I read in this group about the taste of "cooked" or heat-damaged wines. Curious about how it felt, I bought two bottles of $4 Spanish table wine (I think the name of the wine was Pamplona) to cook up experimentally.

I took one of the bottles and put it in the trunk of my car for about one week. The Miami weather then, I think it was early September, was not particularly hot, yet my car spent the days outdoors, so the trunk must have gotten fairly hot.

I took the bottle, marked "damaged" in small letters on the back label, and put it away with the good one in a plain old used wood wine box, where I store my wines.

The sample size for this experiment is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions, but I figured it may yield at least some valuable anecdotal information.

Last night, the significant other and I cracked open both bottles. Poured the wines side by side and tasted blindly (will identify the wines as Nos. 1 and 2 (just like the optometrist does with his lenses). We did not rush to judgment, especially I who sampled both wines several times.

We reached a consensus: Wine 2 was the damaged one. It tasted like an unpleasantly acidic young wine. I had the sense there was another off-flavor component besides the high acid.

Turned the wines around, looked for the "damaged" mark, and to our surprise, number 1 was the damaged bottle. Looks like the heat improved the wine!

To be fair, we also agreed that wine number 1 was not worth drinking and, against her conservationist wishes, poured them both down the drain.

So, I am trying to draw a lesson from this exercise. It looks to me like some run of the mill overexposure to heat may not necessarily produce horrendously offensive results. Also, I have read that heat-damaged wine may "recover" with time, so maybe that's what went on here.

Your thoughts on heat-damaged please.

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Reply to
Leo Bueno
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One of the best wines I ever tasted was one that had been abused in similar fashion. My friend opened it because he was worried that it was damaged.

The point is, although the wine may not exhibit any immediate damage, it wouldn't be a good idea to hold it for extended aging because of possible latent defects.

Tom S

Reply to
Tom S

Actually, I think heat-damaged wine is more likely to fall apart than recover. Don't know the chemistry, but I think there's a consensus that heat-damage can sometimes lead over the shortterm to a more fruit-forward wine (I think Robin Garr had an article at wineloverspage.com re this, you could search there). But that wine is likely to fall apart over the course of a year or two.

Don't know the wine you experimented with,so unsure if non-heated bottle was somehow off. Of course, with $4 wines, there's a pretty good likelihood it saw some rough treatment already - do you know who imports the Pamplona?

As I said a few months ago: "Most reputable shippers use reefers (self-contained cooled containers) on ships. With less expensive wines (where $1 a case reefer cost might make a big difference to mark up), if better companies ship they try to time for moderate temps. A heavily fined/filtered wine (as most mass market cheaper wines are) are less sensitive to flucuations. "

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

Reply to
Dale Williams

Leo Bueno snipped-for-privacy@usa.net asks....

The simple observation might be that the "good" bottle was a "bad" bottle from the git-go and that the bottle in the trunk, suffered no damage from the exposure. But being that that is "too" logical for some.....

As a few have murmured here below the roar of some, exposure to less than ideal conditions may not have any impact on the wine at all. Some have said that just low end wines don't suffer because they're too stupid, not enough complexity to matter. Or if the heat is less than 76.42 F for less than a month, it's OK. Or they may be damaged, but the damage won't show for x months-years-centuries.....

Jeez, some will tell you the agitation and jostling of the wine in your trunk did more damage than the heat, while others will tell you it aerated the wine into new levels of appreciation! Some will probably even try to make a case that the wood box you keep your wine in, has magical properties.

Bottom line? Heat is no good for wine. Period. No matter where you live and no matter what budget you can afford to develop for the grape, keep your wines cool (low to the floor at minimum), dark and dry.

Forget the hair splitting, mind numbing specifications regarding temps, humidity, light sources, until such time that you "can" (read-afford to) put back small volumes of "strong" wines that will keep and improve with age.

Most lower end wines (sub $10-$15 USD) only have so long to drink and most people will manage to drink them up, long before any real damage could occur anyways.

As oversimplified as that all sounds, it needn't get much more complicated, though it always somehow does. If you think I'm kidding, next time you speak with anyone regarding "why" they don't drink wine at all or don't drink it more often, they'll inevitably start churning about how they can't afford to keep it "properly." They've heard all the over the top bull about chillers, humidity, blah, blah, blah, that they're just intimidated by the entire process and find solace in the next micro brew lager instead. Which, BTW, is just fine too, but they're missing out on the wonder of a good wine.

Call a friend and see.

Always here for my fellow syngraphist or oenophile.

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Reply to
Jim

Leo Bueno wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I have read of this phenomena as a way of aging young wines. The better test would have been with a wien that was of better quality and aged to a certain degree (ready to drink as a fine wine). Never the less I want to say that we here at AFW value scientific research and are often available as test subjects. I live only a few (300) miles to the north and stand ready to volunteer on any sample of 1st growth Bordeaux that you wish to test.

Reply to
jcoulter

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