Wine fault
Heat damage
Wine cooked in transit or storage — stewed, flat fruit, often with a pushed-up cork or seepage as evidence.
What you notice
Smell
- Smells of stewed, jammy or caramelised fruit rather than fresh fruit
Taste
- Tastes flat and lifeless — also seen in Oxidation
Appearance
- Colour has browned prematurely — also seen in Oxidation
- The cork is pushed slightly proud of the bottle, or there is sticky seepage around the capsule
What it is
Heat damage is the fault most often caused after the wine leaves the winery, which makes it partly a supply-chain problem and partly a consumer one.
A pushed cork or sticky residue around the capsule is strong physical evidence: the wine has expanded, and if it went out, air came in.
The effect is essentially accelerated ageing without the benefits. The fruit stews, the freshness goes, and the wine tastes older than it is.
Madeira is heat-treated deliberately, which is why the term "maderised" is used for accidental versions of the same thing.
What causes it
- Storage or transport at high temperature — a hot warehouse, a shop window, or a car boot in summer.
- Repeated temperature cycling, which expands and contracts the wine and works it past the cork.
Can I fix it?
No — nothing will fix it
No. The wine has been cooked and cooked things do not un-cook.
What you can do
- It cannot be reversed.
- Check the cork and capsule before opening if you suspect a badly stored bottle.
- If you bought it recently, return it — this is a handling failure, not a preference.
What does not work
Published because a reader holding a spoiled bottle has usually already been told to try one of these. Correcting the specific wrong advice is more use than stating the right answer beside it in silence.
- Chilling it back down
- Restores the temperature, not the wine. The reactions that ran fast while it was hot have already finished.
- Decanting
- Cannot restore aromatics that are gone, and a heat-damaged wine has usually lost them rather than hidden them.
Is it safe to drink?
Not a safety problem
Unpleasant, not harmful. You can drink it; you may not want to.
Yes. Heat accelerates ordinary chemical reactions in the wine — it does not introduce anything harmful. A cooked bottle tastes flat, stewed and prematurely old, and that is the whole of the problem.
A bottle whose cork has been pushed proud of the rim and which has leaked stickily down the side has been hot enough for the contents to expand past the seal. The wine will almost certainly be ruined and may have taken up air; it is not dangerous, but there is no reason to drink it.
Can I take it back?
Yes. If a wine arrives cooked, that is a failure of storage or transport somewhere in the chain.
Sources
Sources consulted
Not sure this is it? Work through the troubleshooter →