Are Sauternes filtered and fined?

[Jenise]

I'm thinking that as clear yellow wines in white bottles, they probably are. But I'm not sure. Am thinking about taking a '75 with me on a trip where it will have to travel snuggled inside my luggage as air cargo. No point wasting the wine if it won't settle out in a matter of days as I would need it to.

Should I risk it or take something younger?

There's no guarantee that a thirty-year-old wine, even if filtered and fined, won't throw a deposit. Nothing an hour or two upright won't cure, though.

[Jenise]

Yes, I would expect it to throw a small deposit, but that wouldn't worry me. I just wanted to be sure that once it got a little shaken up there wouldn't be more of a problem than that. Thanks, Oliver!

A follow up question. I've heard in the past that some bottles can suffer from 'bottle shock' (though I've seen that term primarily in reference to the bottling process itself) in your checked luggage and that letting the wine rest for anywhere from a few days to weeks or more may be necessary for the wine to overcome its jet lag. Is this true and, if so, what types of wines should be considered fragile to this malady? I've always shied away from drinking stuff that I've recently flown with, but I'd love to have a better idea of how much I should or should not be worrying about it.

[Jenise]

Keith,

Your question points to why I asked about fining and filtering. In my experience it's the unfined/unfiltered wines that suffer travel shock. Most whites get cleaned up, so I was presuming that Sauternes would have a chance of surviving the trip where I wouldn't think of taking an old Bordeaux of similar age.

Jenise

Is this true and, if so, what types of wines should be considered fragile to this malady? I've always shied away from drinking stuff that I've recently flown with, but I'd love to have a better idea of how much I should or should not be worrying about it.

Huge debate, and similar to decanting it seems that every wine geek has a different explanation of how the process works.

Personally I have found sparkling wine to be some of the most fragile, as well as lighter wines like red Burgundy, but I have no scientific way of explaining it.

[David M. Bueker]

They are fined and filtered from what I understand, and dessert style wines are some of the most travel hardy wines out there. It's pretty hard to rough them up.

[Jenise]

Great. We're flying to Denmark with friends to celebrate two birthdays, and I thought it would be neat to take along something special, and they're Sauternes freaks.

I've never seen travel shock with carrying wine in luggage, but it's very much a reality in container shipping. The effect is identical to bottling shock, which every wine producer knows. I have to taste all the wines that come in on a container, some of them taste good immediately, some need to wait for weeks. No obvious pattern, and almost all the wines I import are from very small wineries and are not very 'processed.'

[Jenise]

Oliver, I've definitely had trouble with wines shipped in luggage in the past. Wines I was very familiar with and wanted to share how good they were, and then found them dumbed on the other end. The younger and the more "processed", to use your word, the better they survive. And at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I'll even add that I've found pinot the most susceptible to travel shock of all though I realize it doesn't make any sense to blame the grape. I'm surprised at Rahsaan's report of same with sparkling wines. I guess I don't travel with that many bubblies (fear of cork flying under pressure the way time and time again I've had the lids on shampoos and conditioners remove themselves during flight), but cork issues aside I'd have somehow reflexively presumed bubblies to be one of the heartiest. Perhaps because they're see-through, where I presume the problem to be with red wines.