2 Year Storage Experiment, Part 2

For the conclusion of our collective experiment on storage conditions, I recruited several non-winegeek friends and my ever-suffering wife Jean to do a comparative tasting of two different robust reds. The first wine was the 2005 Perrin Reserve Cotes du Rhone in a screwcapped bottle; the other wine was the 2005 Torres "Sangre de Toro" in a cork-finished bottle. Both wines are fairly robust reds and, to reiterate, one bottle of each was stored in our passively cooled cellar 45-60°F annual excursions, <2°F daily excursions) while a second bottle of each was stored in a dressing room on the second floor of our house (60-80°F annual, 5-10°F daily). All wines were bagged and served double blind to avoid prejudice.

Perrin Reserve
bottle #1 - silky texture, mature-seeming (group comments: lighter, smoother)
bottle #2 - rough seeming, more robust (group comments: sharper, stronger, fruitier, darker, rougher)

bottle#1 came from the cellar; bottle#2 came from the dressing room

Sangre de Toro
bottle#1 - slightly corked (!!), jammy, smooth tannins (group comments: lighter, smoother, smells less soapy )
bottle#2 - very similar to first (group comments: same, slightly stronger)

bottle#1 came from the cellar; bottle#2 came from the dressing room

Overall, everyone in the group agreed that there was a distinct difference between the two bottles of the Perrin Reserve, but almost all felt that the two bottles of the Sangre de Toro were very similar (Jean and I both agreed that there was low-level cork taint). Surprisingly, I was sure that bottle#1 of the Perrin was the one from the dressing room, as it seems more evolved than the other bottle to me. Go figger! Most of the group preferred the cellared bottle of Perrin Reserve, though, so the wisdom of the crowd knew the cellared version Even despite the cork taint in the Sangre de Toro, no one found much of a difference between the two bottles. Since it was a heavier-bodied, more robust wine than the Perrin Reserve, it may have been less vulnerable to less-than-ideal storage. Or perhaps, despite my reasoning two years ago, cork-finished bottles are less vulnerable to temperature swings than screwcapped? As with the other experiments in this series, no hard conclusions apart from the fact that it does seem to make a difference in many cases how the bottles were stored.

Mark Lipton
Empirical Scientist-at-large

[David M. Bueker]

It does seem to make a difference. What that difference is remains anybody's guess.