Nenow El Camino Real Red Blend (5)

Nenow El Camino Real Napa Valley Red Blend 5-Pack
$69.99 $242.00 71% off List Price
2006 El Camino Real Red Wine, Page Nord Vineyard, Napa Valley
2005 El Camino Real Red Wine, Page Nord Vineyard, Napa Valley
CT links above

Winery website

Forgive my ignorance, as I have never bought wine online before, but how does wine like this fare through shipping? I had heard from local stores that it often ships in hot trucks causing the wines flavor, aroma, and acidity to become flat. I live in Texas so weather can vary greatly (it was 97 a few days ago, although it’s cool now).

Thanks in advance

Good question
Wine is surprisingly hearty and can take some heat during shipping. Too much heat will cause damage but the damage can usually be seen as cork seepage. Good rule of thumb is if you suspect heat damage try and rotate the foil cap that most bottles come with. Free rotation means there should not be a problem, if it’s sticking or completely stuck you might have a problem. Of course none of this applies to screw tops. In the past wine.woot has been good about replacing heat damaged bootles. Pretty soon summer shipping will begin which means extra special precautions are made to ensure your wine stays cool. Hope that helps.

Thank you for this clear and concise answer; it has helped ease my concerns.

We had these at the recent SoCal meetup. I did not take detailed notes but upon opening the 05’ was completely hot and stemmy. We covered the labels so nothing could influence reviews but no one was surprised at the high ABV once the bottles were unwrapped. People who showed up later seemed to enjoy it more but for me it was just plainly to highly extracted and alcoholic.

The 06’ suffered from over extraction as well but was immediately more drinkable. Some nice dark fruits, not enough acid and again alcohol.

I did come back to them later in the evening but my palate was pretty shot since I probably tasted through 10 wines in between so I won’t comment on it later.

A lot of folks tried these at different times so you will see a wide variety of comments. I think trifecta got a chance at these 2-3 days later so I would be interested in those notes.

So join or create a WW Gathering!

No problem, it’s the questions left unasked that cause problems.

How does your local shops think they get their wine? The wine ships to distributors, who then truck it to local shops. In trucks that aren’t any better than FedEx or UPS trucks.

I buy from local shops, wineries, and Wine.Woot and haven’t had major problems yet. Except for another online site that shipped my wine such that it sat over the July 4th holiday weekend in high heat. Haven’t bought from them again as a result.

Also, during the summer months, Wine.Woot institutes Summer Shipping.

In essence, WW ships the wine via refrigerated truck to central locations in the Mid-West and East. They are then turned over to FedEx or UPS for delivery.

Sometimes there are problems, but as noted, WW is usually pretty good about replacing or crediting any problem bottles.

Sounds a bit ??, but I placed an order anyway. Now just realized we’ll be gone towards the end of the week. Any way to delay delivery?

Hey! Thanks for the reply!

The shops seemed to insinuate that they have refrigerated shipping (the two I spoke with), but I think it’s more plausible that it’s more of the situation that you described. But it sounds like I shouldn’t be too worried either way :).

Also thanks for that link, that’s really smart that woot implements that during the summer. I’m the paranoid type, so naturally I’m overly cautious and the summer shipping along with your explanation and Cortot20s puts my fears to rest. Which is good because I spend entirely too much time staring at wine.woot and not enough time drinking wine from wine.woot.

If it’s this week, you probably won’t have a problem. Woot is not super fast on the wine shipping…I don’t usually see my orders for 2-3 weeks.

That said, if you’re out of town when you get the shipping notice the best thing to do is go to the fedex website via the tracking number and select ‘hold my package for pick-up.’ Then your wine will stay in the (hopefully air conditioned) fedex store and you can swing by when you get home. Usually they’ll hold your box there for a week…if it’s going to be longer than 5 days I’d call the local fedex store and tell them when you’re going to come by and grab it.

As far as the spinning capsule test, there are many capsules that when applied to the bottle do not spin. Simply a matter of capsule material and how applied. So although a bottle that has seeped may have a capsule that doesn’t spin freely, the fact that a capsule doesn’t spin is not necessarily an indication of seepage.

Most seem to fall into the spinning category, so I use it as a test when buying wines locally. Do you have a better suggestion or are you here just to crap on my mine?

An interesting benchmark I’d not thought of, spin the capsule. Can we turn this into a game?

So of the three cases of bottles I just tried to spin, only 13 did so;
and I’ll add most of those would more generally be considered commercial bottles.
Notably only three of what I’d consider higher end bottles spun.

Protruding corks, seepage are highly suspect.
Here’s an interesting link testing for heat damaged wine.

[note to mods] poll question: how do you test for a flawed bottle?

We are going to need to put your hands and wrists through a calibration test to make sure they are inline with average human strength to validate your findings :wink:

No, not all, regarding the crap. Sorry it sounded that way. Just from my personal experience I find more capsules that don’t spin than do. And it seems that imports tend to spin more than domestic, that being a totally unscientific observation. I was just trying to head off people running to their wine purchases, finding capsules that didn’t spin on sound wines and contacting WD for a replacement.

Again, apologies for the misunderstanding. Just trying to bring in another point of view.

Understood, then the only other way to check for light seepage (you’ll know if it’s boiled it will stain the shipping box from excessive heat) is just pull the foil cap off and look for a big cork stain along the side of the cork most of the way or all the way, But even that is not 100%. I have opened bottles with huge stains up the side that are perfectly fine. Any other suggestions? Or things that have not been brought up yet?

Also, any other SoCal, sosocal or NorCal folks want to comment on these wines.

EGADS! We must fix this dire problem!

I had the opportunity to taste both of these two, and quite a few others, a bit over a week ago, but only after they had been open and decanted for around 8 hours and had warmed to a toasty warm SoCal weekend temperature.

Caveat: Most of the wines, including these two, were not showing particularly well and I attribute that almost solely on serving temperature that was well into the mid 70’s for all of them.
The few other bottles I had the opportunity to chill down a bit improved drastically. These two were not given the opportunity to benefit from chilling.

The '05 was a clear medium-deep garnet. Aroma at this stage of exposure was only moderate consisting of ripe fruit and berries, but was showing a bit promising age, and still alcohol.
Medium body, dry, with good acidity and round tannins; a bit of spice on the palate and a medium finish.

The '06 tended more towards red than garnet, slightly less depth and more clarity. Aroma again was only moderate, likely due to the extended decant, but showed more restraint than the '05 with some additional spice box on the nose.
Again a medium body, dry lively, slightly more tannic wine, but '06 was a cooler year.
While the alcohol was still clearly evident here, the extraction seemed more controlled.

I am not personally a huge fan of high extraction, high fruit wine, rather preferring a more restrained hand, so these really weren’t in my wheelhouse and unfortunately due to my late arrival, were tasted under less than ideal conditions.

Chilled a bit compared to how I tasted, if you don’t mind the higher alcohol (hey Stillman!), either of these should hold up well with hearty meals, and at ~$16 delivered for a bottle with some age isn’t too shabby either.

My observations are generally in line with cortot’s. The 2005 seemed heavily extracted while also being quite stemmy. Plenty of alcohol on the nose and oak on the palate. I found the 2006 to be nicer overall, better balanced, and hid its high alcohol level quite well.

If you’re a fan of high octane, big wines then you would probably like this. If you tried other wines from Robert Nenow Winery and enjoyed them, then you will probably enjoy this. I’ve tasted 4 bottles from them now, and none have been in my stylistic wheelhouse, but they all had a similar approach (big, oak, fruit, heavily extracted, etc).