Tom Dehlinger made a brief remark in one of his newsletters a few years back that he had too much respect for the intellect of his customers and the backs of his employees to use oversized bottles.
After moving 300-400 bottles over the last two weeks to our new house and loading up a couple wine cooler units I am not sure what is more frustrating, stacking pinot/burg bottles or trying to get some of the oversized California cabernet bottles to fit into double deep shelving. Not only are some of these cabernet bottles getting wider, they are also getting longer with a high shoulder to the point where you cannot get them to sit properly when staggered neck to neck.
As a comparison, all the Bordeaux bottles fit perfectly.
I broke down and bought a separate set of racks for the wide-bottom champagne bottles. Works great (though as usual I underestimated the capacity I would need and am ordering another set)
The amount of coverage these are getting right now it’s getting crazy. I had to make some edits on my Delectable feed to stop getting bombarded with posts pushing the 40oz rose and muscadet. I have no idea if it’s any good or not and wish them all the success in the world, but the hype was getting too much.
I had no idea that this was an established internet “thing”.
As for the OP, I worked in a gourmet food and wine shop for ten years. We had horrible metal grid-like racks for the wines, and oversized bottles often had their labels scraped/damaged trying to get them in or out of the racks.
When a liquor distribution company brought us a similar display to hold a particular brand’s wines, we refused to allow them to pick it back up later, as only it could accommodate the wider gauge of Champagne and other wine bottles!
In the end, we had to move all the empty wicker gift baskets from the tops of the shelves to store our ever-increasing inventory of fat glass bottles. Even with wooden boards laid on top to stabilize the surfaces, bottles often fell off, permanently staining the ancient tile floors.
Alto Moncayo uses bottles as oversized as the wines inside them.
I bought a few Au Bob Climat chards recently that were in a mega oversized bottle. Somehow, that seemed like an odd fit, for a traditional producer making restrained wines.
Patrick Cappiello from Rebelle and Pearl and Ash is behind them. I have had the Muscudet and it is fine and well worth drinking a hot summer day. The bottle is fun.