Temperature Variation and Corks

[jdaw1]

Vineyard and Winery Management, May-June 2011, page 33, has an article on the effect of temperature variation on corks. Alas the article refers to tests on short-life wines, but, nonetheless, might be of interest to some readers.

[uncle tom]

It seems to me that the problem with effective closure and storage research is the sheer number of variables - type of wine, degree of filtration prior to bottling, mean temperature, temperature variation, exposure to light, closure type, capsule type, storage orientation, bottle format and passage of time, coupled to the fact that it really needs a 25 year (or more) study period.

In practice, the research published tends to focus on short term narrow snapshot trials, often sponsored by parties who have a vested interest in the outcome.

If you took all the permutations of the variables, you could easily find yourself running upwards of a million trials, for which you would never find funding; but if the variables were grouped into twos or threes, with all other variables kept constant for each trial, then some seriously useful results might emerge.

What we need is a nice rich philanthropist to pour a few million into a founding a new dept of oenology at Cambridge University - I know just the place to build it..

Tom

[JacobH]

I notice the article is by Jamie Goode, who is a pretty good critic of Portuguese and other wines (and a member of too!).