At a tasting · 5.4
What to do with it when you get home
Leave the bag closed for an hour. Then expect it to taste different, and check the temperature before blaming the wine.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, the Monitask overview offers a concise companion guide.
The bag comes in from a cold car into a warm house, and what happens in the next hour decides whether what you bought is what you tasted.
Leave it packed for an hour
The entry on storage explains why: warm damp air meeting cold chocolate condenses on it, dissolves the surface sugar, and leaves a crust when it dries.
Bringing the bag inside and opening it later means the condensation forms on the outside of the packaging instead. It costs nothing, it is the single most useful sentence on this page, and almost nobody does it.
Where to put the wine
Anywhere cool, dark and steady. A cupboard on an inside wall is better than a rack in a warm kitchen, and considerably better than the top of the fridge, which is the warmest surface in most houses.
Bottles with corks lie down so that the cork stays wet; screwcaps do not care. Nothing you bought at a festival is likely to be for keeping years, so the requirement is a few months of not being cooked rather than a cellar.
And the chocolate
Fifteen to eighteen degrees, sealed, dark, and away from anything that smells. Not the fridge, for the reasons above, and not next to the coffee, because cocoa butter takes up odours readily.
It will taste different, and that is not a fault
Expect the bottle you loved to be less remarkable at home. Three things changed and none of them is the wine.
You have no comparison set: at a tasting every mouthful was judged against the last one, and here it is judged against nothing. The room is different and so is the temperature. And the person who made it is not standing in front of you being interesting about it.
Give it a fair test rather than a disappointed one: open it with the chocolate you bought alongside, at the right temperature, and taste the pair as you did at the event.
What to open first
The thing with the shortest life. Milk and white chocolate before dark. Any wine that was open at the table and sold as a remainder before anything sealed.
The bottle you are saving for an occasion is the one most likely to be disappointing when the occasion arrives, which the entry on ageing chocolate makes the same point about.
Reproducing the pairing
Wine twenty minutes out of the fridge, chocolate a few minutes out of the cupboard, and the order from the entry on building a pairing: wine, chocolate, wine.
If it works, your note was right. If it does not, check the temperature before concluding anything, because that is the variable most likely to have changed between the event and your kitchen.
Closing the loop on your notes
Add one line to what you wrote at the table: whether it held up. Over two or three festivals that becomes a genuinely useful record of what you like, as opposed to what you liked in a warm room among enthusiasts.
It is also the only way to find out whether your judgement at an event is reliable, which is worth knowing before the next one.
What to do with an open bottle
Stopper it and put it in the fridge, including reds, which will be too cold to drink immediately and can come out twenty minutes beforehand. Cold slows oxidation and a day or two makes little difference; a week does.
Fortified wines are the exception and keep far longer, which the entry on port covers, and are the practical thing to have open when two people want one glass each.
The short version
Leave the bag closed for an hour. Cool, dark and steady for both. Expect it to taste different and check the temperature before blaming the wine. Open the short-lived things first, and write down whether it held up.
Writing it down while you still can
The evening after, not the week after. Ten minutes with your notes and the bottles in front of you fixes what you learned; left a week, the whole thing reduces to a good time and no information.
The first bottle to open
Whichever one you were least sure about. Certainty about the others survives a week; the uncertain one is the one worth tasting again while the room and the comparison are still fresh in your memory.
Where to put the bottles
Somewhere with a stable temperature rather than an ideal one. A cupboard on an inside wall that stays at eighteen degrees all year is better than a rack in a kitchen that swings between fourteen and twenty-six.
Lying down if the bottle has a cork, so the cork stays wet and does not shrink. Upright is fine for a screw cap and for anything you will open within a month.
Which to open first
The lighter and the whites, because they change fastest. The sweet and fortified ones will still be there in a year and are the ones to keep for an occasion.
The bag by the door
The specific hazard of a February festival: a cold car, then a warm hall, then a bag left unopened overnight in between. That is the exact route to the pale crust described in the entry on storage.
The short version
Leave the bag closed for an hour, put the bottles somewhere stable rather than somewhere ideal, open the lightest first, and write your notes up the same evening.
Also in this part
- 1.1
Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight
The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.
Read it → - 1.2
Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth
Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.
Read it →
For further context, see UC Davis wine-storage research.