Cooked Wine
You know how 90-degree days can be the bane of shoppers toting home ice cream?
Well, the heat also can wreak havoc on wine, or so the experts say.
Wine is ideally stored in a cool, dark location to keep it from spoiling. A 75-degree store or room is certainly OK. A car that can reach temperatures well over 100 is not considered OK.
If you happen to leave a wine bottle in a hot car, a sure sign that it has been affected is in the cork.
Heat will make the contents expand and push on the cork. Enough heat and the cork will push out. I have never seen a bottle so exposed to heat that it completely uncorked the bottle. But if the cork is sticking out beyond the top rim of the bottle, it probably has been tainted by the heat.
But how tainted is it?
The common consensus is that if heat pushed that cork out even a little bit, you’re better off returning that wine to the store. It now has become “cooked” wine and is tainted.
Such heat damage will certainly change the wine, but it may not ruin it.
In fact, Robin Garr, who writes an e-newsletter called The 30-Second Wine Advisor for wineloverspage.com, conducted an interesting experiment to determine if cooked wine is actually ruined.
He took two bottles of a cabernet sauvignon, the 1998 Louis Martini, a wine he knows well. He stored one bottle indoors as he always does. He put the other in his car in direct sunlight with a thermometer on a hot day and left it there for eight hours.
With the air outside at 92, he said, the air in the car hit 120. And the cork in the hot bottle had pushed out ½ inch.
He then pushed the cork back, took the bottle indoors and waited a day or two to taste the wine. He tasted the cooked bottle with the uncooked one — blind, with his wife pouring the wine so he didn’t know which was which.
The funny thing is that he found the cooked wine more interesting. “The heated wine seemed muted at first,” he wrote, “but developed with a little air into something surprisingly like a more mature cabernet.”
In other words, the cooked wine was less tannic and more nuanced and complex than the same wine not exposed to extreme heat.
Of course, his experiment didn’t judge what happen to a heated wine that is drunk a month, a year or 10 years later. But he did conclude that exposure to extreme heat for a day isn’t necessarily ruined.
So now the next time you have a wine that’s a little tannic and too young to drink, just place it in a hot car for a few hours to mellow it out — if you dare.
