Bottle Sickness

Bottle sickness is a temporary condition that occurs following bottling. During bottling, wine is jostled and exposed to oxygen as it is transferred from barrels or tanks to bottles. This can cause the wine to temporarily taste neutral or out of balance. Bottle sickness (also called bottle shock) usually goes away in a few weeks, occasionally months.

It’s ok to chill a wine by putting it in the freezer.

“Age gives a wine a sense of beauty and satisfaction that it could never have had before when it was young. In our minds, we intuit that beauty and satisfaction as a feeling of completeness. Because so much of life is incomplete, an old wine is remarkable and moving.”

—Warren Winiarski,
founder of Napa Valley’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars

Get WineSpeed

Join tens of thousands of other wine lovers. Get each week’s edition of WineSpeed delivered to your inbox every Friday. It’s fast. It’s free. It’s the smartest way to stay up to speed on wine.