An Experiment in Wine Abuse

When working on a piece about wine faults, I noted a number of flaws that are generally considered handling errors rather than mistakes originating at the winery. These are the types of faults that are, well, your fault if they affect the wine. Leaving the wine on top of the fridge for weeks, forgetting a bottle of wine in the trunk of the car in January or worse, forgetting your wine in your vehicle over a long weekend in summer — these are all big no-no’s when it comes to treating your wine with love and care.

I’ve been educating consumers about how to care for wine at home for a long time. To sum it up, good is cool, dark and vibration-free. Bad is anything but the above. Strangely, in almost 20 years of dealing with alcohol, I had never thought to put these rules to the test until now.

I thought, what if I were to source out a few bottles of identical wine, keep a control bottle or two in the cellar and see how the abused wine would be affected or not affected in a blind tasting with some others?

The first step was to pick a wine. I chose the current (2010) vintage of Australia’s Wolf Blass Yellow Label Cabernet Sauvignon. It is remarkably consistent from bottle to bottle and year to year. They know what they are doing and it is one of the top selling wines in Canada. The wine is also sealed with a screwcap and produced in quantities that should eliminate human error or minor differences in handling or bottling.

The wines were purchased in early June from a retailer in Calgary to best represent what the typical consumer would experience. They were coded A through F and tucked into my cellar at home to settle down until I was ready to begin the test. The codes indicated if the bottle was one of the control wines or be put to one of the following extremes. One bottle would spend a long weekend alternating from the freezer to the fridge, another the weekend rattling around on the backseat floorboards of my car in hot weather and one would sit for six weeks on top of my refrigerator. The final bottle was destined for six weeks on an east-facing picture window in my kitchen slightly elevated to expose most of the bottle to direct light.

The wines went through their weeks or weekend of abuse and returned to the Wine Access offices to rest a few days before the taste test. I asked a non-participating colleague to cover the letter codes and aside from marking bottle “A” as the first glass to be poured, he assigned numbers as he saw fit to the other bottles to determine the tasting order. He didn’t know how the wines had been mishandled. This way I knew what had happened to the wines, but wasn’t sure which bottle was which (other than the control bottle).

I poured the wines into glassware for the four tasters in order (three others and myself) and put the wine away before we began. In my instructions to the tasters, they were told that the first wine was a control wine and that the five other wines were all slightly different and that the hope of the tasting was to determine if there were any differences or preferences in the wines to the tasters. They were encouraged to taste independently, but were free to discuss perceptions or thoughts on the wines and reminded to compare wines 2-6 with the control wine rather than the preceding or following wine. I tried to go last in the discussions after each wine to avoid skewing the notes.

The results were as follows.

Wine #1

The first control bottle. Tasted like Wolf Blass Yellow Label Cabernet Sauvignon. We liked the currants, spice, rich fruit, menthol flavours and aromas of herb and bell pepper. All in all, a classic warm climate cabernet sauvignon. Some of the tasters thought the wine was a little sour on the finish, and a bit hot.

Wine #2

This bottle spent a long weekend rattling around on the floor of the back seat of my car. The weekend got up to around 30°C during the day and in addition to the heating and cooling, I could hear it clunking around as I ran errands. Tasters found it had a “weaker smell” was “mellower” but also found it smoother and silkier in the mouth. I found it slightly subdued, with bigger chocolate flavours than the control bottle. Most tasters found it improved over the control.

Wine #3

The second control bottle didn’t show so well. Most comments seemed to focus on the dried or slightly subdued fruit or earthy tones, with a stemmy, slightly shorter finish. I felt this wine was similar to the known control, but I didn’t think this would have been the second control bottle. 

Wine #4

A surprising favourite, the tasters loved the white pepper, and baking spice, plum and big, beefy tannins of this wine that spent time in the freezer. This is where tasters started commenting on food to go with the wine. I found the tannins a little rounder than previous bottles, but with a bitterness not seen in the wines so far. The fruits were great, but the palate was slightly disjointed, rather than having a natural progression of fruit, acidity and tannins.

Wine #5

This was the bottle that spent six weeks in the sunlight resting on a little pedestal in the kitchen. I had high hopes for this wine showing some big faults. I have an older house so this wasn’t high efficiency glass blocking UV rays, but should have been a good analogy for leaving a bottle of wine on your counter too long. The tasters felt this wine seemed boozy with an almost cheese-like quality. One thought this wine was the most complex, while another felt this was the spiciest since the first wine. My opinion was that this wine showed a little less fruit than the control wine but was quite sound.

Wine #6

Another favourite among the tasters, this bottle sat on top of my fridge for weeks. One taster commented on the deep fruit flavour, the slightly minty mouthfeel, the soft tannins, and the good balance. Another felt it “lacked the complexity of #4”. I felt that it was a strong contender for the second control bottle. It was complex, vibrant and seemed to be free of faults showing all that mint and menthol of the control wine, with herb and bell pepper notes and a pleasing vibrancy.

The reveal was surprising for the tasters. They correctly deduced that the wines were all very similar to each other, but weren’t sure if they were doctored or if perhaps the wines were different blends or barrel samples. Wines #2 (the car) and# 5 (the window) seemed to show the most damage in the blind tasting with wine #4 (the freezer) being pleasantly softer and rounder. I wonder if the seal cracked during the freezing allowing a little oxygen in and opening up the wine. The car “aged” bottle I suspect suffered from the long slow heating and cooling along with the bouncing around, while the window bottle had an excessive amount of sunlight over the experiment. Interesting to note that the wines that were noticeably affected were never rendered undrinkable or awful.

Wines #3 and #6 seemed to have the least effect from the experiment, a good sign was that these included not only the second control bottle, but also the wine on top of the fridge. It is a little warm on top of my fridge, but the ambient light and vibration didn’t seem to have any real negative effect on the enjoyment of the wine.

Was this experiment a bust? I don’t think so; it was interesting to be able to put together a side by side, blind comparison of the effect of the various don’ts. I’ve been telling people for years not to do these things and it is interesting to note that it really didn’t affect the wine that much. The results may be different with white wine, or even lighter-bodied reds rather than a big, heavy, youthful cabernet. Would I cellar old classed growth Bordeaux or burgundies in the back seat of my car? Of course not. But will I go into a tizzy now if a bottle sits for a week on my kitchen counter? Not at all.