What about the low-tech wine temperature labels?
Living in Texas, we can’t order wine online for about three or four months each year, because it will be cooked by high temperatures during shipping. Neil and I have talked before about how useful it would be to have a wine label that passively showed some temperature history of the bottle. Well, PakSense, Inc. isn’t quite making the completely passive, simple monitor we were thinking of, but they have made something a little more complicated.
I read a few nights ago in the Mercury News that PakSense makes a “high-tech” shipping label, which is about the size of a packet of sugar, that displays if the wine was subjected to temperatures outside of some programmable, specified range. According to the article, the sensor has these abilities.
“Information on exactly what temperatures the product reached—and at what time—can be downloaded via a portable reader into a computer spreadsheet. If there is a problem, the data show where it occurred, helpful in determining who’s responsible.”
Now, I can see how this information would be very useful for a winemaker, distributor, or purchaser of expensive wine. If your wine gets cooked on its way to a grocery or liquor store, you want to have somebody to blame. After all, a lot of money could be at stake.
However, as a wine consumer who tries to find the very best $5-15 bottle out there, I would like to see something a little simpler, cheaper, and more widespread. What I want to start seeing is a little strip on the wine bottle that turns a color, say red, if the wine ever exceeded some critical temperature and time combination. I don’t really care when or why it happened. I just want to know that it did, so I can move onto the next $10 bottle of wine at the store.
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