Noobie storage question

I have never heard of winery re-bottling either. Re-label yes, re-cork yes, but never re-bottle.

Andy

That really got a chuckle out of me.

I was once chastised by a wine tasting room employee because I was cupping the bowl of the glass in my hands. She made a comment to the group (other people I never met) that one should always hold the glass by the stem. It took a bit of will power to stop myself from replying "if you would serve that Riesling at the right temperature instead pulling it out of a bucket of ice water, I wouldn't have to warm it up before I could actually smell anything".

You would think the winery would know better than 1) to make a comment like that and 2) to serve their wines that cold.

Andy

It's done sometimes with much older wines.

Jose

Can you give us an example? I've never heard of this either, even with bottles from the early 20th.

-E

Alas, I cannot. It's something I read about somewhere (maybe even here, but maybe not).

Jose

I have been to the Smithsonian, it's fantastic. Hope to get there again next year, and will probably pass through Dulles, since National (or Reagan, or whatever) seems to not be taking so many flights. I'd love to see the Dayton one, but hey: it's in Ohio. Off my beaten track. :)

Hmm, that's a little rough for a hedonist. I guess you just have to try even harder. Maybe I'll try a couple of fruit bombs. My thing is just temporary, connected to a facial nerve paralysis that hopefully will be gone in about a month. I'm starting to get a little motion back already, but no taste yet. I just started a treatment for the taste issue, though. Anyway thanks for the thought, but luckily mine is nothing very serious.

Didn't think to look. It was a USAF plane though. I'll take a look and see if there's a pic in the literature later.

-E

Yes, I've been the object of derision in some circles for just the same thing. At a board retreat some years back, the Chard was served at about 35F, and, though it was a warm evening, I cupped the glass to warm it up a bit. The next morning at breakfast one of the Dr's commented for the assembled, that "hey, I thought this guy knew something about wine. Heck, he doesn't even know how to hold a wine glass." Happens all the time. I don't like fingerprints all over the crystal either, but it's necessary to consider the serving temp of the wine. Even a lowly "event" Chardonnay deserves the best that we can give it. It was somebody's dream, even if that person was an accountant back at corporate headquarters. I'll pour US$4/btl wine into a good glass, just so I can enjoy as much of it as is possible. It's about pleasure, not just drinking great quantities of wine.

I also agree about some tasting room folk not being 100% with regard to customer satisfaction. I've had them pour corked wine, and then blow off a whispered suggestion, that they pull said bottle from the line up. Even a family member/mktg. director of a respected Napa vineyard once poured a corked bottle in a trade tasting, "What does Reserve really mean?" He didn't replace the wine, only commented that "some of you will not be able to taste our Reserve Chardonnay in the sampling, as it is corked... " Heck, the resort sold his wine, and the sommelier could easily have gotten a few more bottles - AND he should have brought extras with him!

Hunt

Wine goes bad in a matter of hours. One bottle should be good for two or three people at most for an evening. Have you nobody to share a bottle with?

"Michael Scarpitti" wrote .....

Hmmm - Michael you have a poor memory - do you not remember writing in this group a couple of years back that wine goes bad in minutes, and that you always put the cork back in the bottle to stop this happening.

Or - are you tempering your troll-like tendencies and entering the real world of common sense.

Next you will be recommending that the OP should "taste" the wine before drinking - just to ensure it is still drinkable.

Then again, pigs may fly !!!!!

Yeah, I've heard that joke too! :)

I think that most of us know how microwaves work. (Bearing in mind microwaves are not in the radio range of the electro-magnetic spectrum. One does not, for example argue that X-rays are inoffensive because they are just ionizing radio waves.)

The issue for old wines, as far as I'm concerned, is that the microwave oven doesn't heat evenly. Hot spots can get very hot; that's why you have to stir (or I do in my cheap oven, anyway. Like Hunt, we don't really use the thing for cooking. Works great for melting butter, though.) The establishment of adequate convection takes too much time to prevent these spots from getting cooked.

So, I'll not take the risk of altering the taste of more delicate wines, for which in fact I can usually plan well in advance anyway. Which is not to say that there aren't any number of restaurants that do it regardless of the wine in question...

-E

I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that...

Yes, the uneven nature of heating in our microwave, at least, would certainly lead me to use it cautiously (in fact, I do occasionally use it to gently warm wines from the fridge -- emphasis on gently). Ours is a very old model (ca. 1981) so I don't know if newer models would perhaps not suffer from that problem. The issue of how to get uniform intensity of the signal from a small number of broadcast sources leads me to believe that all microwaves must suffer from that problem, though to varying degrees. It's a bit like getting a stereo to give an accurate reproduction of a concert hall performance, no?

Mark Lipton

Yes, they can, if you heat solids for long enough. But wine is a fluid so convection can transfer some energy, and in the course of five seconds, I have not found any part of the wine to get "hot".

Jose

I believe that all percieved rules about wine storage change as soon as the cork comes out of the bottle (or, increasingly, when the top is unscrewed!). So any arguments are relative.

For storage of sealed wine ie. for maturation, a balance needs to be found that allows the wine to mature without it doing so too rapidly. Opinions vary between about 10C-18C (50F-64F) but within this temperature spread the results will vary enormously. At 50F, wine matures extremely slowly and I think it's fair to say that not everybody wants to wait 30-40 years for a bottle to evolve to its optimum drinking stage. At low temperatures like this, there is also a risk of tartrate crystals forming. In my opinion, this only really causes an aesthetic problem and doesn't affect the overall taste of the wine.

At 64F, the same degree of maturation may take only 10-12 years (please don't hold me to these estimates!) and some might say that the end result is a slightly lesser wine (as the slower the maturation curve, the better the end result), but as long as the environment has been constant, the wine will certainly not have cooked.

I run a climate controlled wine storage facility in Adelaide, South Australia, and the maintain our 250 cellars at a steady 59F (15C). This is a 'happy medium' as it keeps the wine well below room temperature, whilst still offering my clients the opportunity to enjoy their wines, rather than their children/grandchildren!

Aside from the actual temperature itself, it is the constancy of this temperature that is most important.

So to opened bottles. These obviously develop much faster as they are in contact with the air, hence the wine's survival is measured in days rather than years. Very few bottles are still enjoyable after more than three or four days open and out of the fridge. A recent study that I read (I forget where, sorry) suggested that storing opened wine in a refrigerator will keep it for between 6 and 16 times longer than outside the refrigerator. Indeed I found an open bottle of 2005 Clare Valley Riesling behind a lettuce in my fridge recently that must have been open for a month. It was delicious.

Since you are only looking at preserving an opened bottle for a few days until you have had a chance to finish it, I don't think there is anything wrong with keeping it in the fridge. It can take months or years for most faults to develop. If the choice is pouring half a bottle of 20 year old Coonawarra Cabernet down the sink or keeping it in the fridge, allowing a glass to warm to room temperature and enjoying it over a week, I know what I'd do!

I may have rambled a little here, but it is a subject close to my heart.

I'm keeping well out of the microwave debate though!

Cheers! Matthew

Hi Matthew,

Nice post and good to hear your perspective in the storage biz, ozward.

I and I'm sure others would appreciate a little quote to remind our befuddled heads what the OP was asking about! These threads do wander... ;)

I don't believe there is any risk of tartrate crystals forming at 50F. I thought the temp had to approach freezing for "cold filtering" to take place. No doubt a winemaker (Tom?) or a chemist (Mark?) can tell us the exact temperature.

It is generally agreed that there is no damage caused by this effect.

Personally I have a colder cellar, usually around 12C. But I like your compromise, and I bet the punters do to. Not to mention saves on the electric bill. I think most of us would be very hard pressed to distinguish between a bottle aged at 15C and one at 12...

-E

There is if the wine wasn't cold stablized at the winery. 50F is definitely cold enough to cause the precipitation of tartrate over time but I think most wines are now brought lower than that before bottling so it doesn't happen after bottling.

Andy

OK, thanks Andy, glad to learn something new.

-E

Ok, let's go with recorking. There is still new oxygen introduced into the ullage area, yet this doesn't seem to harm the wine, at least not enough for it to not be done. Except for the aeriation, rebottling into splits should be the same. As long as there is very little air in the bottle (the bottle is filled up), the wine should last a good long time.

Jose

Yes, Emery, it's just a matter of solubility. Potassium Hydrogen Tartrate, like most other solid solutes, decreases in solubility as the temperature goes down. So, a wine that's saturated with KHT at room temperature will deposit tartrate crystals at lower temperature.

Mark Lipton