I looked at the bottle and started salivating…should I? Shouldn’t I?  How will I afford to eat for the next month if I buy this wine?  I looked at the bottle, standing upright in a Plexiglas enclosure with a lock on it.

Then I began thinking…about the proper storage of high end wines

How long has this wine been sitting upright?  What is the temperature inside the store? 70F?  Has the UV light shining down through the opaque skylight caused any negative changes in the wine? In Arizona, where I live, there is such a high level of UV light outside that you can almost get a tan sitting indoors off the secondary UV light!  Now, the store in question only opened last October, so I know that at least the wine hasn’t been in that particular environment for very long.  But where was it kept before hand?  At a distributor’s warehouse?  Unconditioned? Through the Phoenix summer, where temperatures regularly exceed 115 Fahrenheit, or 46 Celsius, for all my metric friends.  How was the wine delivered? 

How did it get from the Barossa Valley in Australia all the way over to Phoenix, Arizona?  So many questions and the answers I kept coming up with lead me to believe that somehow this 100 point wine was not kept under ideal conditions, and therefore no longer a 100 point wine.  On the other hand…how sensitive is wine?  Do serious connoisseurs baby wine too much and spend too much money on unnecessary storage set ups?

This article was edited by Jon Troutman