…is cooked wine. Yuk.
Jeff at Good Grape has an excellent post up today outlining the dangers of not being available to sign for your wine shipment when either UPS or Fedx attempts delivery. Many in the industry try and mitigate the dangers of having wine cooked in the back of a delivery truck by shipping during the cool fall and winter months, but Jeff offers up a good alternative suggestion: temperature sensitive stickers.
Basically if your wine shipment arrives with the sticker showing that extreme temps were experienced during shipping, you as a customer can reject the shipment.
It’s a novel idea, and certainly less expensive than some other solutions I’ve run across. Give the entire post a read here, and feel free to comment and let me know if this is something you would find useful.
I think it’s a great idea. We had recently written a post about delivery http://grapethinking.com/cutting-costs-on-delivery/ and how to bring down some of the costs. One of the things that it seems many wineries are missing, is that UPS lets you request call ahead for delivery if it is a package that has to be signed for. There is no charge for the service, and it would be nice if more wineries would do this, as it would eliminate some of the ‘truck-time”, and exposure to extreme temperatures.
[...] a recent post on wine getting overheated in the back of delivery trucks, Jake pointed me to one of his posts over at the Grape Thinking blog that mentions that UPS will [...]
I solved the problem of cooked wines by having my wines shipped directly to my wine locker at a large facility which signs for my wines and is open 6 days a week M-Sat. The wine is put in storage at 55 degrees immediately. I make sure wine is shipped on MON or TUES. I then transfer the wine to my personal locker at my convenience. Perhaps the biggest advantage of this arrangement is that my wife never sees the constant stream of wine deliveries which tends to insure marital harmony. Also the facility discards and or recycles the shippers so I don’t have to be concerned with their disposal. Try it, you will like it.
Rusty,
Thanks for the comment! I’ll have to mention what you’ve said in a future post and point out the places like Vinfolio will take possession of your wine and store it for you.
Much appreciated!