Upright or on its side: A Theory

I know this topic comes up periodically and my take on things likely isn’t novel. I’ve had trouble shaking the notion below for a couple days and wanted to run it past you and see if there’s any real data on the topic (because I have zilch).

I was thinking about why we typically lay bottles on their side to age them (I do, too) and whether there’s any data that supports supine bottles being any better than upright bottles over time.

I know we think we store them on their side to keep the cork wet and therefore prevent it from drying out. Maybe that’s true. A couple thoughts on this about which I’d love this crew’s opinion.

  1. As collectors, we store bottles on their sides, ostensibly to keep the cork wet. Could it be that the real reason we store bottles on their side is because that’s the way French chateaux/domaines have always done it in their cellars for hundreds of years and if it’s good enough for them; it’s good enough for us?

  2. If mimicking winery cellar storage is the real reason we do it (I think it might be, because they must know best), then why do the wineries do it this way? Is it really to keep the corks wet?

  3. Most (maybe all) of the first cellars where bottles of wine were kept to age were natural caves or excavated caves, all of which were made out of rock. Chiseling rock is a hell of a lot harder than carving/cutting wood. Clearly, making a shelf out of a piece of solid stone (or chiseling a shelf into the wall of a cave) is a hell of a lot harder than making them out of wood.

  4. If the above is true, storing 1000 (or 5,000 or 15,000) bottles with the fewest number of shelves is optimal (less chisel time).

  5. Wine bottles will stack laying on their sides. I don’t know exactly how high (without breakage from the weight of other bottles) but I know it’s at least six high as I’ve had them stacked this high on each other in my offsite locker at various times. Nothing broke. Wine bottles will not stack standing up. I tried this once in college and once was enough. Something broke.

  6. Could it be that the reason we lay bottles on their sides is because 1000 years ago it was easier to make one large cutout in a wall of solid rock than it was to make multiple shelves out of that same piece of rock? Could it be that our penchant for laying wine down has more to do with the practicality of bulk storage a millenium ago than it does with assisting or shepherding the aging process?

I think (although I have no data) that I may be onto something. Storing bottles upright seems to me to be to be potentially superior. A few supporting points:

  1. If the liquid is up against the cork in a wine bottle, the cork is moist. But wouldn’t a cork be in a 99% relative humidity environment when standing up? It’s a virtual vacuum in there and below about half an inch of air is liquid. Isn’t the cork moist regardless?

  2. TCA is still an issue. Some are more sensitive to it than others. When a wine is corked, it’s from TCA on the cork. Wouldn’t having the liquid in direct contact with an infected cork for a longer period of time make the taint worse? Let’s say two corks are lousy with TCA. One cork is used as a closure for a bottle of wine stored on its side (direct contact with liquid). The other is used as a closure for a bottle of wine stored standing up (no direct contact). We age both bottles for twenty years. Upon opening, shouldn’t we expect the former bottle to taste more “corked” than the latter? If not, why not?

  3. Cork is a natural product. Just like a piece of paper, a blade of grass or my elbow (also natural products), it “tastes” like something, even if subtly. If the two bottles of wine in #2 above weren’t lousy with TCA, shouldn’t we expect the former wine to have more imparted “cork” taste than the latter? It seems so. Maybe the taste adds to the complexity of the wine and that’s a feature and not a bug. But still, wine A has to taste corkier than wine B, right?

  4. The surface area of the liquid exposed to air is larger in a bottle on its side than upright, right? If slow aging is the key, shouldn’t we optimize for the minimum air contact surface area possible, assuming there is at least some part oxygen in the air trapped in the bottle?

OK, I’m done. Does anyone have any data on any of this? Think there’s anything to my theory?

-af

(title updated to better reflect the post)

A great post. All good questions. Of note, there is ZERO evidence that the dogmatic practice of storing bottles on their sides is in anyway beneficial.
You alluded to the idea that humidity inside the bottle is already at a maximum, and therefore keeping the cork “wet“ by having the wine in contact with it makes no difference. I would also add that there may be a detrimental effect, in that the alcohol may contribute to gradual degradation of cork integrity.
Just another example of things that “everybody knows“ that, in fact, nobody knows, because they have not really been tested. This is true in wine, but in many other aspects of life as well.

how would you store hundreds of bottles upright?

Is that a serious question? Shelving. Just like in the store.

I’ve never been in a store that stored hundreds of bottles vertically.

Bottles are stored vertically in most stores, at least on display shelves. The ones that aren’t on the shelf are stored in case boxes, which can be stored in any way desired.
The point is that the volume of the bottles is the same regardless of their orientation. If we decided that upright was preferable, shelving and racking would be available to accommodate that.

Good points here. It’s akin to the myth that many still adhere to is that wine needs to ‘breath’.
No it doesn’t. P&P.

well it sure wouldn’t be practical for a home cellar.

it’s insanely more efficient for storage - pic below from Beaucastel; you can stack as high, wide, and deep as you’d need. the rest of the analysis doesn’t change for up and down.

I still wish there were a wine research lab out there willing to test and to validate or debunk these various “conventional wisdom” matters in wine.

I’ve loved reading about that in cooking. For example, it turns out that most of the cooking truisms about steak are incorrect, and a lot of people have wasted a lot of effort fretting about doing and avoiding certain things when it really was never necessary.

Yeah, this makes zero sense to me.

Wine wasn’t stored in bottles until the 17th century, and those bottles were short and squat. Wine bottles didn’t come in the current shape until the early 19th century, which means storing choices analogous to today’s only go back that far. It may be that storage lying down is much more efficient, but I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the difficulty of cutting stone.

Very true. I learned years ago that it’s OK to cut into a steak on the grill to see how it’s doing.

Horizontal storage makes it easier to access any bottle at any time, so that part is better for relatively small/home collections.

That wouldn’t matter as much for large #s of the same bottle, so vertical may be better in this case if the theories mentioned by OP are true.

Someone should start a thread on this, so we can debate it. [head-bang.gif]

Maybe true, but the main point of the OP is to question why bottles are stored on their side and whether it is to protect the seal, some other reason or a combination of reasons.

I’d actually like to see some investigation into whether storing on the side might be detrimental.

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2018/06/storing-wine-on-its-side-is-bullsht-says-scientist/

Great post and questions, and something we debate every few years.

Horizontal storage is more space-efficient due to easier stacking. IMO that’s why it’s been done that way since bottle shapes evolved to an approximation of their current configuration.

Keeping corks moist was a secondary and later consideration that “made sense” to some. It is not supported by any empirical evidence or based on any significant theoretical advantage when one considers that the inner end of the cork is exposed to close to 100% humidity. The external aspect of the cork might become more brittle and difficult to remove, possibly increasing the risk of seal failure in a low humidity environment, but that is true whether the bottle is stored horizontally or vertically.

I don’t know about stone carving, but more bottles per cubic meter and easier stacking would seem to apply regardless of the cellar construction materials.

There are a few threads on this subject. You should do a search.

Bottles are on the side because it’s the most efficient way to stack them, using the least amount of space. They’re built into wooden-shelved wine cellars with individual slots because again, it’s the most efficient way to get to them easily. Upright on shelves is not as efficient as they’re frequently different heights, and they are more apt to fall.

You don’t store them on the side to keep the cork moist. Cork is waterproof. It’s not a sponge. And if it isn’t waterproof then your cork is compromised.

As mentioned, bottles were not stacked on their sides until they were mass-produced. That came about with Robert Mansell, who I’ve posted about before. Once you could mass produce bottles, you could mass produce stoppers. That’s why we use cork. They weren’t using bottles 1000 years ago so they weren’t chiseling stone out of a mountain to make cellars for bottle-storage. Everything was stored in the cool area of the cellar if you had one - cheese, cabbage, beets, ale, wine, oil, ham, smoked fish, grain, etc.

But most people in Europe and elsewhere didn’t live like that. They were peasants who lived in hovels and huts. If they were lucky, they had a little cave dug out of a hillside like you find all over Hungary and central Europe, or they had a little area under their hut, or they had an area next to a river. Same in the early colonies in the US. Most of the consumption of mead, ale, beer, and wine was by peasants, not by nobles, and neither group was generally storing it for aging purposes. They were just storing it until they could finish it.

Mansell lived in the 1600s. And even during his time, wine wasn’t generally stored or sold in bottles. Wine has only been stored in bottles for about two-three hundred years. It was mainly sold in casks until the late 1600s to early 1700s. In fact, selling alcohol in glass containers was banned in various places from time to time because it is so easy to manipulate the shape to make you think you’re getting more volume than you are.

Touch, my man. You should be able to tell how your steak is by a simple touch. For medium rare: You want it like the feel of your thumb at its base when pressed together against the forefinger! [cheers.gif]