Humor me, if you will, for a brief trip down memory lane... A little over 16 years ago I was in Napa for a wine writers conference, my first (and last after getting myself blacklisted.) Arriving a couple of days ahead of the event, I had the chance to interview some industry folks and tour a couple of wineries, including Robert Mondavi.
Despite being a very well-known and larger winery, the tour and tasting were exceptional. It didn't hurt that the then genial head of marketing tasted me through the wines in a relaxed, one-on-one session in the otherwise empty cellar - or that I was also enjoying their hospitality for a couple of nights in a villa on the Franciscan property. Ah, the good old days...
The wines were phenomenal, particularly the reserve wines. But there was one wine I had recently had at home that I got to taste again at the winery: the 2006 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Napa Valley. (For anyone keeping score on wine prices, that wine was readily-available for $25. Adjusting for CPI inflation, that's $38 in today's dollars, but the current price is a whopping $54. Is it any wonder the wine business is on the ropes?)
I digress. At the time I observed that the difference between wine at the winery and the same exact wine off a grocery store shelf 2,500 miles away can be night and day. When tasted at the winery, its intensity ratchets up considerably while its freshness was unmistakable.
That realization from 16 years ago has haunted me many times since. The inevitable deterioration of quality that wine experiences during conventional transport is, perhaps thankfully, only evident if you have a fresher example to compare it to. From a practical standpoint, I cannot imagine how much more expensive wine would be if importers and wholesalers adhered to end-to-end climate control, but if you think of wine as a perishable product like fresh vegetables, it's not so unreasonable.
A Gemini prompt asking if "...any wine importers/distributors use end-to-end climate control to ensure wines are as fresh and unspoiled as possible?" stumped the LLM for a solid minute before sharing the names of some wholesalers I'm familiar with - familiar enough to know that their delivery trucks have no AC, let alone climate control.
Bottom line is that a fresh wine that lacks complexity or profundity can out-deliver an expensive, pedigreed wine that's suffered the randomness and vagaries of supply chain. How can you tell the difference when standing in front of shelves at your local retailer? My best advice is to just ask.