A few months ago I read in this group about the taste of "cooked" or
heat-damaged wines. Curious about how it felt, I bought two bottles
of $4 Spanish table wine (I think the name of the wine was Pamplona)
to cook up experimentally.

I took one of the bottles and put it in the trunk of my car for about
one week. The Miami weather then, I think it was early September, was
not particularly hot, yet my car spent the days outdoors, so the trunk
must have gotten fairly hot.

I took the bottle, marked "damaged" in small letters on the back
label, and put it away with the good one in a plain old used wood wine
box, where I store my wines.

The sample size for this experiment is too small to draw any
meaningful conclusions, but I figured it may yield at least some
valuable anecdotal information.

Last night, the significant other and I cracked open both bottles.
Poured the wines side by side and tasted blindly (will identify the
wines as Nos. 1 and 2 (just like the optometrist does with his
lenses). We did not rush to judgment, especially I who sampled both
wines several times.

We reached a consensus: Wine 2 was the damaged one. It tasted like
an unpleasantly acidic young wine. I had the sense there was another
off-flavor component besides the high acid.

Turned the wines around, looked for the "damaged" mark, and to our
surprise, number 1 was the damaged bottle. Looks like the heat
improved the wine!

To be fair, we also agreed that wine number 1 was not worth drinking
and, against her conservationist wishes, poured them both down the
drain.

So, I am trying to draw a lesson from this exercise. It looks to me
like some run of the mill overexposure to heat may not necessarily
produce horrendously offensive results. Also, I have read that
heat-damaged wine may "recover" with time, so maybe that's what went
on here.

Your thoughts on heat-damaged please.

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