Sherry is often bottled with a little crappy cork. They don’t seal all that well. Storing the bottles on the side risks getting sticky goo on other bottles. There’s no reason not to store them upright. I’d imagine the same goes for Madeira. They’re already oxidized so you do no harm.
I agree with Rick - I’ve never heard of alcohol reacting with the cork to produce taint. Tran - whatever sources you’ve been hearing from are imaginative, not necessarily credible. If you have taint, you have it. There are all kinds of micro-organisms that may be found in cork - it’s a porous material that was outside for most of its life. Any bark has various fungal organisms, bacteria, and who knows what else. TCA is a specific taint, but not the only one, and alcohol is generally toxic, so it’s not likely that the alcohol is going to CAUSE taint.
As far as acidity goes - there’s little that’s more acidic than Tokaji-aszu and that gets stored on its side for years and years and years. Ditto some of the whites in Rioja, Germany, and elsewhere.
Finally, as to whether or not you should store the bottle on the side - it’s more complex than most people realize.
In some ways it shouldn’t matter. It’s far more convenient to stack them in great heaps on their sides than to stand them up. But you have a cork, which SHOULD be a perfect seal, and you have a capsule on top of that most of the time. The cork should not “breathe” and the humidity in the air space in the bottle is going to be close to 100 percent.
So think about the logic. If your liquid has to touch the cork to keep the cork moist, and the cork is drying from the top end, shouldn’t moisture be wicking out the top? Therefore shouldn’t the entire cork be wet?
But that’s not exactly what happens. Cork is mostly air - something like 80 - 90 percent. It’s bark, so is a kind of wood, but while “wood” is mostly cellulose, cork cells are mostly suberin, which is a kind of wax that you also find in plant roots. That’s pretty impermeable. Several things happen and they’re not really understood, but it’s not about keeping the end of the cork wet to keep the entire cork moist.
When you squeeze the cork to put it into the bottle, you compress the air spaces in the cork. Eventually it springs back as some of the air dissipates. But if you look closely right after bottling, sometimes you can see tiny bubbles from the cork - squeeze a sponge while it’s submerged in a pot of water and you’ll see the same thing. That’s one source of gas into the bottle - usually the headspace because if your’e smart, you don’t put the bottle on its side immediately after bottling.
Over time, the cork cells in contact with the glass eventually lose their flexibility or resilience. That’s true of any closure - rubber and plastic as well - and the greater the pressure against the glass or metal or whatever, the more rapid the decline in flexibility of those cells. So the cork as it sits in your wine bottle goes thru some changes in the first months or years. So far so good.
How would oxygen get into the bottle?
Well, gas is diffused through random motion - motion that’s increased as temp increases and the kinetic energy of molecules increases, making them bounce into each other faster.
For gas to diffuse INTO the bottle thru the compressed cork, first the molecules must go thru the capsule. Nobody ever talks about that, but surely that matters? Otherwise why wrap your food with Saran Wrap or aluminum foil when putting it into the fridge?
Secondly, there has to be higher pressure and outside the cork than inside the bottle, perhaps because of higher temps outside the bottle, to cause that diffusion. Thirdly, the air has to diffuse from a lower atmospheric concentration into the higher concentration in the cork cells, which have been compressed. Fourth, the gas has to go thru all the air spaces and curved passageways in the cork.
Finally, the bottom of the cork has air spaces that get filled with fluid and tiny particles, and in sweet wines sometimes tartarate and other deposits, essentially blocking them as passageways for air/oxygen.
If you’ve jammed up the bottom of the cork by having the wine on its side for a while or whatever other reason, you can plug up those spaces on the bottom. Wine doesn’t really diffuse thru the cork body itself. If it escapes due to increased pressure in the bottle, perhaps because of heat, it first pushes the entire cork and eventually seeps around the cork. Mind you, the cork itself is also under the same temperature pressure so the internal pressures of the cork to some degree work against the wine, but because the cells in contact with the glass are not as flexible as those internal to the cork after time, they can allow some passage of wine.
People say that wine has been stored on the side for a long time, therefore it’s the “correct” way to do it. But that’s like saying we’ve been sacrificing virgins every other year and haven’t had a volcano erupt since anyone can remember. There just aren’t that many studies, especially controlling for all the variables.
In my own case, I’ve had bottles standing for many years now. It wasn’t intentional but the more I thought about it, the less I worried about it. Opened a 2000 Cab Franc last night that had been standing for 8 years. No problem. Ditto with a number of wines from the 1990s. Whether they would have been the same had they never ever been stored on their sides, I can’t really say. But looking at the cork from that 2000, it has a couple of streaks maybe a quarter up the side and that’s it.
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