When Temperature is the Enemy of Fine Wine
In the summer of 2004, my son and I hiked into the Appalachian Mountain Club’s hut next to Lonesome Lake for a three-day weekend.
I had packed two bottles of Bordeaux in my knapsack to sustain me. However, I was greeted by a sign at the trailhead specifying “No Alcoholic Beverages in AMC Huts.” So I returned to the car and unloaded the two bottles of wine.
It was August. It was hot during the day – perhaps eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. We swam in the lake. It was a wonderful weekend.
On Sunday afternoon we hiked back to the car and were greeted by the fragrance of over-ripe grapes. The corks were intact. However I noticed some seepage under the capsules. I put the two bottles of Bordeaux into a nearby mountain stream to cool them off, hoping for the best. But the wine was history: flat, little aroma, acidic and cooked. It was a rude reminder that wine is a living and organic substance – more easily abused than we might think. Perhaps because the bottle is hard, we assume the contents are more durable than they are.
I was left wondering, 85 degrees F is just 30 degrees Celsius. That is not that hot. But perhaps the car heated up more in the noonday sun? What level of sustained heat does it take to spoil a wine? How frequently does this happen?
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Today, wine is a major item in global trade, totaling $13 billion and rising. Wine is routinely shipped between five major continents and is exposed to a wide variety of environmental challenges. Wine importers who are concerned about over-heating the wine often request that the container be placed below decks on the ship. However, compliance with this request is far from 100%. I heard one story about a shipper who had confidently requested a container below decks, later received a message that
their container was lost, as it had fallen overboard in a storm!
| London to Japan | Burgundy to Shanghai |
| Above 30 degrees | Above 28 degrees | |
| All Global Shipments | 8.9% | 17.6% |
| France to US | 7.3% | 14.0% |
| US to US | 9.8% | 11.5% |
| France to France | 11.7% | 14.7% |
| France to Japan | 5.7% | 15% |
| France to UK | 2.2% | 4.4% |
What can we do about this? This will be the subject of my next blog…
December 16, 2009
Posted in: Fine Wine Cold Chain, Temperature Research 
2 Comments
The Value of Verified Provenance
In February of 2007, I attended a fancy black tie dinner hosted by Sothebys, Château Mouton-Rothschild, and the New York Alliance Française. It was a fund-raiser with a stunning vertical of Mouton-Rothschild, followed by a serious wine auction a week later. Beautiful young women dressed in white served us from magnums.
1924 magnum
The 1924, pictured here, was fresh, fragrant and delicious, despite her age. And the entire vertical was both educational and very tasty. Naturally, I was curious about the Provenance. When I enquired as to where these wines had been stored for up to 83 years I discovered that all of these magnums had come directly from the Baroness Philippine de Rothschilds personal cellar at the Château. Clearly another very good reason we should all own at least one château.
While I had not intended to be a bidder in the Sothebys Auction, I decided this was a great opportunity to acquire some wine with super-provenance. After the dinner, and still under the afterglow of fine old Mouton, I filled in my absentee bid form. Uncharacteristically, I bid near the top end of the range, since I really had appreciated these wines even the younger vintages, with their fresh, fruity bouquets, unsullied by wild temperature fluctuations.
I heard nothing back from Sothebys for several weeks. I finally called to see what had happened. It turned out most of the lots sold at 25% to 35% ABOVE the high end of the estimated range. My puny bids were left in the dust by the savvy collectors who saw an opportunity to plunder Philippines cellar.
Yet, overall, the experience reinforced my quest to assure the provenance of fine wines. The loss at the Mouton auction spurred me on to explore the differences in value between an average case of wine at auction, versus one with a real pedigree. I also realized that our eProvenance system, which tracks temperatures and humidity during long-term storage as well as temperatures during transit, could be used to verify provenance both over the short-term and over the long-term. Essentially, each case could carry an electronic passport, capable of registering and verifying its history!
So we have begun the work to quantify the value of provenance. I started with interviews. Simply stated: If you have a choice between one case of fine wine, and another case of wine that is the same, except it has been temperature-monitored since birth, which do you want? So far, everyone I have posed this question to has opted for the case with an electronic passport and a provenance pedigree. Now the tricky question: How much more would you pay for verified provenance? The answer I generally received was five to ten percent.
Angelo and Melani
But how could we quantify this provenance premium?
I called Angelo. We all need a buddy like Angelo. Angelo is on top of the wine auction markets worldwide. He is also a big financial whiz. So I guess cruising online auction prices is sort of like a sport to him. It beats looking at mortgage-backed securities these days. I emailed Angelo and said, “Could you compare the prices paid for Bordeaux wine in the legendary Hart Davis Hart auction of the Fox Cellar wines, with the other auction transactions for the same wine in the same month, September, 2008.” Angelo emailed back, “I will take a crack at it.”
Within 24 hours I had a full spreadsheet with a total of 2250 bottles of first growth Bordeaux that had sold at auction during September and early October 2008, just before the crash.
To appreciate why we are calling the Fox Cellar sale a super-provenance sale, you need to understand a bit more about this cellar. This quote from the October 2008 article ”Cellar’s Market” by Jennifer Waters on www.marketwatch.com provides some insight: ”Before jumping into wine as an investment, consider the circumstances surrounding last month’s Hart Davis Hart auction. The nearly 1,800 bottles of wine at auction were from the Fox Cellar, what the world of fine wine deems one of the most important and largest single-owner wine collections in existence. No one but the executives at Hart Davis Hart know who Mr. Fox is — or even if there is a Mr. Fox — because they are all sworn to secrecy in confidentiality contracts. But what is known is that he is a long-time collector and avid aficionado who has bought much of his wine through Hart Davis Hart. Even after the sale, there’s still plenty of it left. ’For one person to have this much wine is unbelievable,’ said Paul Hart, chairman of Hart Davis Hart. ‘He’s got all the modern vintages that people want in amazing quantities. Instead of one case of ‘96 Lafite, there are 22 cases.’ “
Coupling this result with a companion super-provenance auction, the Grünewald Cellar auction by Acker Merrall in early October, we discovered a strong and statistically valid trend:
Value of Super-Provenance
We concluded that super-provenance is worth 20% to 30% in todays market. That is a large number. For those who are concerned that it might cost another $20 to keep the reefer turned on in the delivery truck, or are still shipping in dry containers in the summertime, or think that it is okay to store the wine for a while in a tent, it is time to look at the bigger picture. Provenance matters big time to consumers and they are ready and willing to pay for it, if they have proof. Enter eProvenance.
October 20, 2009
Posted in: Fine Wine Cold Chain 2 Comments
Why I started eProvenance
A couple of experiences led me to dive in head first to the world of wine provenance. A few years ago, I attended a wonderful dinner in Fronsac, an appellation near St. Emilion, Bordeaux. We were served a very tasty vintage 2000 Fronsac wine. The owner of the château was sitting at the next table and I had the temerity to ask him how many more cases he owned, and what the price might be. His answer, ”I have just over 100 cases, but the price is nine euros per bottle.” I began to salivate.
By the end of the dinner, I had sold all 100 cases to eight different chapters of the Commanderie de Bordeaux also attending the event. That was the easy part. The difficult part was getting the wine safely to the United States! It took over a year of negotiating and calling in friendships to find my way through the distribution system from Bordeaux to Boston. Everything was set to go in the spring of 2006. But it took weeks for the wine to even be picked up from the château. Then it took another several weeks for the two pallets to actually get loaded onto a truck bound for Le Havre. I thought we were home free, so I called the importer. No, we are waiting for the wine to be consolidated into a container. Now it was August, and the temperature in Northwestern France was climbing. I had this sinking feeling that my two pallets of wine were sitting either on a dock or in a local warehouse, exposed to the summer heat, waiting for a container.
When the wine finally arrived in Boston in late September, the taste was disappointing. The freshness and fragrance of the bouquet I remembered from Fronsac had faded. It had clearly suffered in transit. And of course, I had little recourse. I was dealing with a two hundred year-old distribution system that had never bothered to monitor its performance.
Eric Vogt & Corinne Mentzelopoulos
At first, I simply chalked it up to experience. But then a few months later I had the luxury of dining with Corinne Mentzelopoulos at Château Margaux. I casually asked what her business concerns could be, at the leadership of one of the five First Growth estates. Corinne surprised me with this reply: Well, I am glad you asked. We have spent 25 years perfecting our viticulture. We have invested millions of euros in our winemaking facilities and storage facilities to achieve the optimal fermentation and aging of our wine. We ever so carefully bottle the wine. And then we send her out to a global distribution system where who knows what happens to her! We have no idea where our bottles go, we have no idea how they are stored and transported. But all too frequently when we taste our wine, whether in Chicago or Hong Kong, it just does not taste the same! I am concerned that the wine is exposed to temperature extremes and is not always well cared for on the way to the consumer.
Aha! I connected the dots. My story of the 100 cases of Fronsac was perhaps no isolated incident. Even Bordeaux’s first growth wines grappled with this global distribution chain that had no quality control system! Wine is a living organism; it can be damaged by high and low temperatures. However, no one was even monitoring temperatures through the distribution chain! There were data recorders you could lease for $75 to measure the temperature while the wine was inside a reefer container. Good start, but not good enough. The problems arise during the transitions on the dock in Le Havre, and in the local delivery to Chicago in the winter.
Eric Vogt, Founder & CEO, eProvenance
Thousands of people are involved. There are five, six or seven steps in the chain. No one person has responsibility for more than 20% of the journey to market. Basically, it appeared to be the kind of complex technical and sociological problem that only a crazy entrepreneur would consider touching. And that is exactly why I started eProvenance.
My goal is to create the kind of dynamic, online feedback system that will encourage the global wine industry to construct and monitor Fine Wine Cold Chains, so that more of us have the opportunity to taste the same wine that the winemakers have labored so diligently to produce.
October 8, 2009
Posted in: Fine Wine Cold Chain 1 Comment