Did I spoil my wine?

[yarnfoodcoffee]

I found an incredible wine a few years back, in a "Last Chance" bin. It was a 2002 Chehalem Cerise from Willamette Valley, Oregon. Brilliant! A beautiful Gamay Noir/Pinot Noir blend. The most gorgeous wine I'd ever tasted. Well, since they produced so few cases of that particular vintage, it took me MONTHS to track it down. I lucked out, and found a case from AvalonWine.com. I could hardly believe my luck. Unfortunately, at the time I was living in an apartment with southwest facing windows, and no air conditioning. The coolest place in the whole apartment was on the floor in the kitchen, against the wall farthest from the windows and next to the bathroom. That summer it easily reached 80º F in my studio apartment, but the kitchen always had ventilation from the open window and a fan. No sunlight ever hit that case, and it remained closed up except when I first opened it.

It's been over 2 years since then, and we've since moved to a place where I have a nice, dark, dry, cool closet to store my wine. Recently we had some friends over for dinner, and I opened a bottle of my special wine. It tasted dramatically different than I'd remembered (but at first taste 2 years ago, I'd already had a bottle of House Red with a friend.) It was almost sour, like it had more tannins and needed to breathe longer. My friends tried to convince me it was fine, but I'm not so sure.

Either way, I'll have to open a bottle and taste it again to be certain, but did I spoil my wine by leaving it in my hot, stuffy apartment? Should I have stored it in my public storage unit, where it was always nice and cool? Or has it been aging too long? Thanks in advance for any advice.

[This message has been edited by yarnfoodcoffee (edited 04-25-2008).]

[This message has been edited by yarnfoodcoffee (edited 04-25-2008).]