Moving old bottles without killing them.

A bottle can spend fifty years in a perfect cellar and be finished by eight hours in the back of a van. The damage is not exotic. Wine expands as it warms, the cork is the only thing in its way, and once wine has been pushed past the cork, air replaces it and the bottle never recovers.

Heat is the whole problem

The threshold that matters is roughly 25 degrees, and what matters more than the peak is the number of cycles. A bottle that warms and cools repeatedly suffers more than one held steadily a little too warm.

A closed vehicle in a European summer reaches 50 degrees in the afternoon. A parcel depot without climate control sits above 30 for days. An airport apron in July is worse than either. None of this is unusual or avoidable by choosing a better courier: ordinary parcel networks are not built for wine and do not pretend to be.

The evidence afterwards is visible on the bottle: the level has dropped, and often there is a stain under the capsule where wine escaped. It is one of the few forms of damage you can read from outside the glass, and by then it is done.

Vibration, light and position

Vibration unsettles the sediment in old red wine and, on very old bottles, is thought to accelerate chemical change. The practical consequence is the resting period below.

Light matters most to Champagne and to white wine in clear glass, where ultraviolet exposure produces the fault the trade calls lightstrike within hours, not months. Old Champagne such as Cristal is made in clear glass precisely because it was designed to be visibly clear, which makes it more vulnerable, not less. Bottles should travel boxed.

Position. Wine travels lying down, so the cork stays wet, unless the journey is short. Then it stands, so the sediment stays at the base. The rule in practice: lying down for the distance, upright for the last day.

Resting a bottle after it arrives

This is the part collectors skip, and it is free.

Standing the bottle upright lets the sediment fall to the base. Opening an old red that has just travelled lying down means pouring the sediment into the glass, and no amount of careful decanting recovers it.

What proper transport looks like

For anything serious, three requirements, and a forwarder who cannot confirm all three is the wrong forwarder.

• Temperature-controlled vehicles, held between roughly 12 and 16 degrees for the whole journey including

any overnight stop, with a temperature log you can ask to see.

• Insurance at agreed value, in writing, naming the bottles. Standard carrier liability is calculated by

weight and is meaningless for a bottle worth five figures.

• Custody, meaning a named operator from collection to delivery, not a handover into a parcel network at

the first depot.

For an old bottle travelling to Switzerland in July, the correct answer is often to wait until October. We say so when it applies.

How bottles leave this cellar

Once. Every bottle here leaves storage a single time, for its buyer, in temperature-controlled transport and insured, and it arrives either at your address duty-paid or into your account at a bonded warehouse, with the customs side handled either way.

The condition described before departure is the condition that arrives. That is the whole promise, and it is why the transport is not the place to save money.