Bordeaux producers embrace real-time product temperature tracking
As prices for Bordeaux wine reach ever more astonishing levels, chateaux owners are finally tackling the tricky, and long ignored, issue of shipping and transport conditions by testing new temperature tracking solutions. Fine wine can often be shipped in worse conditions than ice cream or lettuce. Extreme heat, extreme cold, and fluctuations of temperature are all problems for wine, but heat is often the hardest to spot. A frozen bottle might have its cork pushed out, show residue in the bottle, or simply be broken.
The damage done to a wine’s taste, smell and colour by extreme heat is something that can go unnoticed until opened, despite you having possibly paid anywhere in the region of 400 to 1,000 pounds or more for it.
The fact that temperature damage often goes undetected is also partly due to its fragmented distribution system, starting in Bordeaux, where wholesale merchants buy from chateaux, and then resell to importers or retailers around the world. Producers, most of whom say their responsibility stops at the front gate, often ignore who is buying their wines and how they get from chateaux to shop. But as prices for fine wines increase, along with the risk of fraud, traceability is becoming more of an issue for the consumer.
“We make the best quality wine we can and don’t want mistakes in delivery,” said Jean-Charles Cazes of Chateau Lynch Bages, who has begun temperature tracking trials with the property’s white wine, Blanc de Lynch Bages.
“I have never had a problem, but we have all had doubts about bottles we have seen, with leaking corks for example, so we can see the wines might not have been shipped in optimal conditions,” said Cazes, who already takes the precaution of not shipping Lynch Bages from June to September. “Up to two years aging can take place in one week, if temperatures exceed 40 degrees, or, if they get higher than 25 degrees for two to three weeks, as can happen in the Panama Canal.”
