Heat & Shipping

How hot is too hot to ship wine? ShipCompliant has their default ‘too hot’ settings at 77 degrees… other websites I’ve looked at put the their weather advisory cap at 90 degrees. Does any body use ShipCompliant and how do they like their Temperature map tool?

Shipping during the heat is a really complicated subject with many, many variables.

Wine is more durable than many give it credit for, but the two things you want to avoid are sustained exposure to extreme heat and situations where there is a high frequency of temperature variation (going from warm to cold to warm to cold over and over again).

When deciding whether you can safely ship wine, consider some of these factors:

  • How close is the recipient to you?
  • What is the high temperature of the destination?
  • What are the temperatures on the delivery path?
  • What time does UPS/FedEx pick up from you?
  • How long will the wine be in transit?
  • What shipping method will you use (Ground, 2nd Day Air, Overnight, Priority Overnight)?
  • What day of the week are you shipping (is it going over a weekend)?
  • Are you using cold packaging?
  • What bottle sizes are you shipping?
  • Is the wine going to a residence, business, or UPS/FedEx center (deliveries tend to go to the latter two earlier in the day)?
  • Will the recipient, so please help me god, be available for the first delivery attempt?

If you’re shipping wine to a business address a state over and are using Priority Overnight and cold packs, your wine might easily survive the 95˚ temperatures. If you’re sending wine via Ground to the other side of the country in pulp over a weekend and the recipient doesn’t get it until the third attempt, it might get compromised at 72˚.

It really just depends.

As most of us ship primarily via Ground, a good rule of thumb is if you expect the wine to spend more than a day in 75˚ temperatures, you probably want to start investigating other options (cold packaging, cold-chain, 2nd Day Air).

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This is a very thorough and thoughtful response. Don’t miss the last bullet point, the answer to which is so, so very often no. I also agree that wine is more durable than some think, but being right doesn’t make us right so err on the side of caution.

The customer has obvious reason to have this go well, so if you are already in conversation with them make them a part of the plan.

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Thanks very much for a very thought provoking & helpful response! I’m glad there’s not one straight forward answer that I have been missing and it really is a balancing act of many factors. Right now I’m working on increasing clear communication with customers and definitely making them part of the plan (heat advisory on website, clear communication in tasting room)

I haven’t used cold packs before- my initial thought was that the condensation from the cold packs could cause potential damage to the shipping materials or possibly wine. I just put some in the freezer to test out.

I essentially only use UPS- but am going to do some research on FedEx’s cold chain shipping. Let me know if any one has any thoughts on that. Once again thanks for your response EdFarmCollective & Dan!

Hey Donna, it’s awesome that you are trying to make sure your customers have good delivery experiences. I know a lot of wineries that don’t care about it at all, but I think it reflects your winery’s values.

The cold packs we use go in styrofoam shippers with special cutouts. There are no sweat cold packs that you can purchase but a lot of wineries just put the cold packs into ziplock bags to address condensation. If you are considering this, I highly recommend you get the correct foam packaging, it won’t work well with pulp.

As far as FedEx’s cold-chain goes, it seems to work fairly well, but is wildly expensive, can be very slow, and only available to certain zip code ranges. A lot of time it’s cheaper and a better experience to just cold pack your wines and upgrade to an air option.