Eight months ago I brought some wines into the house to see if the higher temperatures there had a discernible effect on aging. Yesterday for Thanksgiving we had our first experiment with the 2014 Rhys Pinot Noir Alpine Vineyard. We compared the bottle from inside the house with the bottle from the cellar using the usual protocol. Nine guests participated, four pairs sharing the same set of glasses. Each person in a pair was allowed to guess independently.  One person correctly chose the bottle that was different from the others but misidentified the source; nobody else correctly identified the bottle. I would have correctly identified both the bottle and the source if I had stuck with my original impression, but I was talked out of it by my partner. Probably the cross talk between pairs had an effect, so it might be cleaner to have everybody with their own set in the future.

Here is a graph of the temperature difference between the two locations over the last 18 months. The red line is the inside room, the green line the cellar (blue is humidity inside).

We’ll do this again next year!