The myth of travel shock

[Mel_Knox]

I don t think refrigeration is the entire issue. There is the constant vibration of the ship, etc.

This is not to say things cannot go wrong with temperature either way. I was a witness in a case where the container of Lafite and Lafite family wines was frozen when the thermostat went haywire.
Heat damage is always an issue.

[Alan_Rath]

@T. Altmayer

How is travel shock any different from decanting (not talking about older wines with sediment that needs to settle)?

It’s not. That’s one of my points.

@Steve Slatcher

Could travel affect colloidal suspension in a reversible way?

There are some colloidal suspensions in wine, mainly those composed of tannins. But from what I’ve been able to find in literature, their binding energies are on the order of 5kJ/mol. So while a bit weaker than just a straight hydrogen bond, still much, much stronger than could be disrupted by vibrating or shaking a bottle, or even putting the wine in a blender.

@NoahR

Did you really throw out theoretical calculations in kJ/mol? I haven’t seen that much pseudoscientific garbage since I taught high school chemistry 20y ago. Thoroughly entertaining.

When I taught college chemistry, these kinds of calculations were still in use. Maybe chemistry has changed since then
But see above, because apparently there are still some scientists writing in Latin who still use kJ/mol.

[Barry_Paul_Price]

@Alan Rath

It’s been, what, two or three weeks since we’ve had this discussion? Actually, the ongoing “Wine transport” thread got me thinking about this again, so I did some simple calculations to demonstrate that travel shock can’t be real. If you want to read through some previous threads, here are a few. Fun to see posters who aren’t around any more:

Wine storage in Minneapolis - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Travel Shock - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Travel Shock Debunked? - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Do you believe in "travel shock?" - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Is "travel shock" real? - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Bottle Shock - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Do Bottles Need to "Quiet Down" After Shipping (re: Salon Champagne)? - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Do you believe in travel shock? - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=117

Let’s first stipulate that travel shock is something many believe “stunts” a wine in some way, and takes time to recover from. What that “something” is, no one seems to know, though many believe in it. I’m going to eliminate the components of stirring up sediment, and temperature changes from my arguments. If you shake up an old wine with a lot of sediment, it goes without saying that the bottle should sit for a while to let the sediment settle. And if a wine gets cooked during travel, that’s not travel shock, it’s cooked wine.

So, let’s get to it. For travel shock to exist, there has to be some chemical change taking place. A reversible chemical change (because, supposedly, the wine recovers weeks or months later). And it has to be a chemical change that can be caused by just the action of gently moving the bottle in a car, boat, or plane (please be patient, because you’ll soon see what “gentle” action needs to happen to effect a chemical change).

Let’s put some numbers behind this: typical molecular bond energies are on the order of 200-600 kJ/mole, let’s say 300 on average. That’s the energy it takes to break, say, a carbon-hydrogen bond in a molecule of ethanol. Or we can use the hydrogen bond energy, which is an order of magnitude less at about 20kJ/mole. Or we can think in terms of activation energy for a reaction, which is in the same ballpark with numbers like 100kJ/mole (a “typical” value). I realize these numbers are probably meaningless to most readers here, so let’s think about it in another way: If we wanted to impart 20kJ/mole of energy to a bottle of water by dropping it on the ground, we’d have to drop it from 75 miles up. You read that right: 75 miles. And that’s just to disrupt the weakest of interactions between molecules, the hydrogen bond. To break real covalent bonds takes another order of magnitude. Which, btw, is why skydivers whose parachutes fail to open don’t explode in a cloud of gas. They just go splat.

Here’s another example to help get a sense of scale: how fast do you have to throw a snowball at the wall to give it enough energy to melt when it hits the wall (assume the snow is just frozen at 0 degrees C)? Answer: 816 m/sec, or over 1800 miles/hour. No, you’re not reading this wrong. You need to fire that snowball at more than twice the speed of sound. And that’s just to melt the snowball, you haven’t changed the resulting liquid water to wine by altering its chemical structure - that would take a lot more energy (as shown above).

Now, think about the energy imparted to the contents of a bottle during transport: driving along a bumpy road, sailing along a gently rolling sea, even taking off and landing in a 747 - none of those are even in the same zip code as the energy needed to change any chemistry of a wine.

And we haven’t touched on the notion of “reversible chemical reactions”, which are actually not very common. Most reactions take place because the end products have total energy lower than the original reactants (some reactions are driven by entropy over energy, but they are less common). Once the reaction happens, it doesn’t just “reverse” on its own back to the original components. That takes energy. Usually more energy than was required for the forward reaction. But this doesn’t really matter in the discussion, because we’ve already seen that jostling a bottle of wine around can’t possibly cause any chemical reactions in the first place.

Though that does raise the question: is there some mystical property of “travel” that affects a wine differently from just carrying it around, or pouring it into a glass? I’m at a loss to think of what “energy” could be imparted to a bottle while riding in a container ship that’s not there when I carry the same bottle out of my cellar, or tip it over and pour out the wine. Or swirl the wine in my glass. Or take a sip and swish it around in my mouth.

If the science told us something other than that we need many orders of magnitude more energy than can possibly be supplied during “travel”, I’d be happy to leave the door open on the question of travel shock. But it doesn’t. Believing in travel shock is like believing you can broad jump across the grand canyon.

The truth is that nothing we do to a wine while carrying it, pouring it, swirling it, etc., changes its composition. Just like shaking your orange juice or salad dressing bottle doesn’t change it (except to distribute the contents more evenly), stirring your coffee, blending a smoothie, etc., etc. We don’t worry about those things because they do no harm.

So, believe in whatever mystical travel shock gremlins you like, but science tells us travel shock can’t happen.
Oh, and will the folks who advocate putting wine in a blender to “open it up” please talk to the travel shock folks who worry about jostling a bottle while driving down a bumpy road? But if you’re really worried about travel shock, make sure to drive the Royal Deluxe II to your next offline

Jtube: Saturday Night Live: A Bris in the Royal Deluxe II - Aish.com

Scientists recently did electron microscope captures of travel shock happening. See the evidence for yourself. It conclusively proves it’s real.
[resizeableimage=430,320]http://dujye7n3e5wjl.cloudfront.net/photographs/640-tall/time-100-influential-photos-loch-ness-monster-21.jpg[/resizeableimage]

[Alan_Rath]

@William Kelley

This post from back in 2009 struck me as very persuasive:

@Jeff Pf0h1

Travel shock.

Yes it exists.

Chemical kinetics can be altered with temperature, pressure and motion (vibration). You can slow some and speed others depending on which variables you play with. Some are REVERSIBLE, and some are not.
(temperature is generally not reversible)

High frequency vibrations, as they exist in transit (cars, planes) do push some reversible chemical reactions faster and stop others completely. Luckily, unless you subject wine to high frequency vibrations for days, the newly made chemical compounds resulting from the high frequency vibrations are not stable and will revert back to their pre-ship state (almost). Older wines suffer more than younger and need more time to recover and don’t recover as completely (fewer active chemical compounds). A few hours is about the amount of time needed to induce travel shock. A drive across town will not do it to a noticeable (taste/smell) effect. FedEx easily, even a cross country trip via air.

LOW frequency, like hiking with wine in your backpack, does not induce such reactions. Well it does but you would need low frequency for WEEKS, some believe months. (cognacs shipped around the world for instance, but they also expose those to temp swings so…)

One test that me and some friends did was ship some bottles, and handcarry others from France. Identical bottles from the winery. We’re talking cases to remove any bottle variation. Noticeable differences in taste/smell existed when they were all back in the USA. We ran some GC/MS because we’re geeks and saw measurable chemical differences. But after 6 months all the wines became chemically similar again (within our measurement abilities and statistics) with GC/MS.

The chemical equilibria of wines are quite sensitive (just look at the impact closures can have on redox potential). So to me this sounds plausible. But I imagine you read this post, Alan? What do you think?

Personally, my own observations strongly incline me to believe the phenomenon exists—and that it lasts longer than can be explained by suspended sediment.

Well, what Jeff wrote is nonsense, with no basis in science. It’s his “belief system” for how wine responds to external stimulus. But not once in dozens of undergraduate and graduate chemistry courses was I taught that motion or vibration could impact chemical reactions (notwithstanding stirring to keep things homogeneous). Are there some esoteric reactions that could be impacted? Probably. There are exceptions to almost every rule. But if they exist, they are surely uncommon, and probably require some other set of ultra-rare conditions.

As for “redox potential” with different closures: first, I would advise never using that term. It has been misappropriated by the wine crowd to somehow describe having too much or too little SO2, relative to the amount of O2 let in by the closure, but the term has a specific and very different meaning.

[Alan_Rath]

@M A T T H A R T L E Y

I guess what I’m saying is that the above scenario is what I believe travel shock to be…the comment “For travel shock to exist, there has to be some chemical change taking place.” I don’t believe to be accurate.

He doesn’t need to leave the sediment argument out, as that is what travel shock is…young wines without sediment you can open in CA and drink a bottle with friends, check one in luggage, have the same bottle when you land and they will taste the exact same.

Then call it “sediment shock”, which I’m fine with. But plenty of people believe that young wines with little or no sediment (including white wines) suffer from travel shock, and that’s what I’m pointing at.

[Alan_Rath]

@Ian Sutton

Hi Chris
The experiment has been done, using a wonderful home-made contraption (post including video of it)
http://forum.auswine.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15492

I can’t recall the result, but it’s in the above post

Fantastic link, thanks!

[Steve_Slatcher]

@Alan Rath

@Steve Slatcher

Could travel affect colloidal suspension in a reversible way?

There are some colloidal suspensions in wine, mainly those composed of tannins. But from what I’ve been able to find in literature, their binding energies are on the order of 5kJ/mol. So while a bit weaker than just a straight hydrogen bond, still much, much stronger than could be disrupted by vibrating or shaking a bottle, or even putting the wine in a blender.

Thanks, Alan