Thanks to both of you.... I will look into an alarm....might be nice
add on for Eurocave to consider....linked to net software that would
send a txt to cellphone!!!

Maybe an offline to side by side frozen/unfrozen bottles blind....

JB


On Sep 27, 4:22*pm, cwdjrxyz > wrote:
> On Sep 27, 2:13*pm, wrote:
>
> > Youch!!! *Went into my eurocave last night for the first time in some
> > weeks (no time for drinking lately) and the bottles on the back of
> > bottom shelf frozen!!!!
> > in cave...with instant read was 17F !!!!
>
> > Two bottles with popped corks...others iced over.
>
> > Defrosted slowly.
>
> I doubt if much damage has been done to the wine, provided the corks
> have not been forced completely out. Since the freezing causes
> expansion, considerable pressure likely was built up that caused
> partial or complete expulsion of a few corks. Of course any bottles
> with completely popped corks should be dealt with at once. It might be
> best to leave them frozen, cover the neck with something, and put them
> in a freezer until you are ready to thaw and drink them. Very little
> air can penetrate the frozen wine. For those in which corks have moved
> just a bit, I would try pressing the corks in after the temperature is
> back to normal to see if they will *move. If they will not move,
> likely little or no air will be pulled back into the bottle, but it
> would be safest to drink such wines in the fairly near future.
>
> For the bottles for which the corks have not moved, I doubt if any
> serious damage has been done. In general, lowering of temperature
> slows down chemical reactions. The extreme cold may have caused
> sediment to form, mainly tartrates, that is less soluble in cold wine
> than in wine at normal temperature. Some of the tartrates may go back
> into solution over the long haul. Many wines form tartrates if not
> cold stabilized by chilling them to a low temperature briefly, before
> separation of the wine and bottling. This likely does nothing useful
> other than preventing sediment from forming in wine before it is sold
> and causing alarm and rejected sales by some. Some wines are not cold
> stabilized, such as many of the best German late harvest wines. You
> should see the large amount of tartrate crystals in some of the better
> German 1976 late harvest Rieslings. There is even a story, perhaps an
> urban myth, that one US wholesaler tried to reject a shipment of fine
> German wine because he thought the wine had broken glass in it!.
>
> There are over-under temperature alarms that I suggest anyone with
> much valuable wine should have in their cellar or wine storage unit.
> As you found out, malfunctions of refrigeration equipment can happen.
> Usually the unit quits cooling. Howeve,r in rare cases, the unit cools
> all of the time as apparently happened in your case. Sometimes a relay
> hangs closed and causes this problem. A malfunction of a thermostat,
> especially an electronic one, also could cause this problem.