For people in the warmer climes or really anywhere. I believe most heat damage is done to imported wines before they are shipped to the USA. They then run the gauntlet of potential heat hazards after arriving from the shipper.

Here's a link to a short article about The Wine Lovers Page on Cooked Wines

At a restaurant the other night we ordered two bottles of the same wine that were both clearly cooked - leakage, stained cork, poor taste. It was on to the next wine. What a waste of good wine.

I just can't imagin how a top-class importer (or exporter) would let this happen.

Is keeping the price down more important than having a good bottle of wine?

Do you think the know this is going to happen when they ship?

Do they think this won't happen when they ship?

I can understand when we had a dock strike several years back at the Port of Oakland. They knew that there was lots of wine sitting out there waiting to be unloaded for weeks. That is more or less beyong their control. But shipping it and knowing that there is a chance, however small, that the wine might get spoiled is unthinkable to me.

What about the wineries themselves? Hey Winetex, tell us all again about your visits to wineries in Italy with cases of wine stacked on the dock in the Tuscan sun.

There's some BIG BOX retailers also.

Years ago I went to a CostCo and there on the loading dock in 97 degree heat were some 20 or 30 cases of Opus. A half hour later when I came out of the store it was still there.

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Hey Winetex, tell us all again about your visits to wineries in Italy with cases of wine stacked on the dock in the Tuscan sun.

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And in Bordeaux, etc. It's clear very few of the trucks transporting wine from the wineries to the distributors to the cargo ships are air conditioned. For the most part the temps aren't so bad that it's a problem but when we were in Piedmont in early June two years ago it was 94 degrees. I asked the wineries about it and they said they would hold off shipping a few days until the heat wave broke but I wondered.

IIRC, there was a story about the 1989 Beaucastle. Apparently one of the containers coming to the west coast had its air cooling system fail. There were a LOT of leaking bottles with slightly pushed corks.

OK, bad stuff happens, but the part that got me was that the distributor went ahead and sold the wine as if everything was fine.