The Auswine Forum

What's been your experience / advice regarding moving house with wine? I plan on buying a wine fridge soon, if I move and need to take the wine out, am I likely to impact on the wine's longevity of anything? Any advice as to packaging them up to minimise issues other than breakage?

Caveat this coming from a guy who currently has all my wine in boxes on the 'cold' tiles on the bottom of my pantry in Sydney

A few comments

1. Definitely remove the bottles from the wine fridge before shifting it. Not only are they heavy anyway, the extra weight of the bottles could cause structural damage to the fridge when moving it.

2. Whilst too much is made of heat impact on wines, in Australia you can get heat extremes. A few hours at 25C (say) and I'd really not be stressed, but I would be worried aboput (say)35C for a few hours. Utterly anecdotal advice of course, but most of us simply err on the side of caution.

3. Thermal mass can be your friend. 200 bottles boxed up and sat next to each other, with some added tissue / packing paper can mean it takes a long tiome for the wine temperature to rise, even if the air temperature is worryingly high

4. I'd be tempted to delay buying the fridge if feasible - not ideal to unpack and level it, only to then repack it and move it.

Nick Wine Guy wrote:What's been your experience / advice regarding moving house with wine? I plan on buying a wine fridge soon, if I move and need to take the wine out, am I likely to impact on the wine's longevity of anything? Any advice as to packaging them up to minimise issues other than breakage?

Caveat this coming from a guy who currently has all my wine in boxes on the 'cold' tiles on the bottom of my pantry in Sydney

I've done this recently.
As Ian said, no wine in the wine fridge.
Advise the removalist of your plans. Best to move the wine during cooler temperatures/early morning.
I packed mine in good quality 6 packs and taped them together to make dozen packs. All was fine.
Wine is shipped all over the world, no issues with transport, other than extreme heat.

Yank them out of the fridge then plonk them straight into cardboard boxes and only move them in the car during the morning or later at night. I don't think a sudden spike to 20-25deg will do any real damage to the wines but I'm sure 30+ even in a couple of hours isn't going to do any good to them though. Meanwhile, some of my quaffers that lived outside the laundry for 18 months seem to held up just fine...

I had to move around 400 bottles from a wine fridge to offsite storage (1 hours drive) while also moving house. I decided to set aside a day to do just the wine by myself ahead of the actual move and would do so again.

Reasons is as outlined by others, don't want to trust that amount of money to chance in a truck where heat damage could be a factor that would definitely not be covered by removalist insurance.

I have two big wine fridges in HKG.

I will just add one point from experience. In high humidity, removing the wine from the wine fridge, will see them "cold soak" in the humidity. A thin film of label damaging moisture will form.

To counter, I run the air-conditioning and keep a towel handy to dry off. Works fine. At most threat is old fashioned paper and glue labels.

SYD summers can be quite humid?