Train Crash -- And Clean-Up -- at Salem Wine Imports
Posted 05/02/2008 at 05:39 PM by Cathy
It was a wine shop's version of a train crash.
Eric Olson locked the door to his wine shop last Sunday evening and everything was fine. Then he unlocked the door Monday morning, and everything was definitely not fine.
"I knew right away I was in trouble," he said, as soon as he opened the door and felt hot air from inside the shop whoosh toward him. Olson rushed around opening doors to let cooler air in, but it was too late.
Olson's wines were cooked. And so was his goose.
In the span of less than 18 hours, Olson lost some 2000 bottles of wine. He closed the shop to assess the damage and deal with the insurance company. He opened wines from 75 different producers and all of them were bad. He discarded everything that was in his shop that day except for a few bottles of Beerenauslese that, although degraded, he thought were still worth sipping.
How did this happen?
Overnight the thermostat for Salem Wine Imports malfunctioned and raised the temperature in the shop to somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees.
Imagine a few thousand bottles of wine sitting in a room all night that was as hot as a Bikram yoga studio. Hot air may be great for coaxing limber muscles into pigeon pose, but it is not so great for fermented grape juice. The heat pressurized the juice inside the bottles so that some wines on Olson's shelves actually seeped beyond their corks, leaving a thin, sticky trail of cooked grape juice behind.
(That's one way to tell whether a wine has been heat damaged: check for stickiness on the neck or just below the neck of the bottle.)
The experience threw him for a loop. But Olson landed, a little warily at first, on his feet: the insurance covered the damage, Olson replaced his stock, and he reopened on Thursday with even a little glimmer of humor.
Usually there's a theme to his regular Tuesday evening tastings. The theme for next week's event? The "everything I have enough of" tasting.
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