A prominent Burgundy producer came over and we visited a wine store.
He was quite upset when he saw that they were stocking the magnums, including his own, vertically. I said they’re probably only going to be like that for one or two months until sold but he said that amount of time could make a difference and then gave me an extensive lecture on how complicated the role of the cork is.
I’ve never heard of this but defer to his far higher level of expertise. Maybe the changes involved could only be perceived by someone like him or may only take place in the more delicate wines such as Burgundies.
What is crucial is the humidity in the room. Low humidity may help dry out the cork, no matter how the bottle is placed. On the other hand, tests done by a large winery show that you can store bottles vertically if the humidity is high.
Maybe the changes involved could only be perceived by someone like him or may only take place in the more delicate wines such as Burgundies.
I would say no to both of those. If he can perceive the changes, so can other people, and they can’t because there are no changes, and Burgundy is no more delicate than anything else.
Logically, if you assume that the contact with wine is continually keeping the cork wet, that implies that the other end is continually evaporating wine and it’s wicking though the cork. Cork isn’t like a napkin where that might happen.
Nor is air coming into the bottle, unless you have compromised corks. The position of the bottle is immaterial.
There have been studies in Australia from the 1990s that demonstrated the fallacy of most cork myths. More recently, at a convention, Vance Rose, director of sales and marketing at Amorim Cork said “No oxygen enters a bottle through any form of natural cork from the outside.”
If you look at the cellular structure of cork, it makes sense. It also makes sense that the liquid in the bottle doesn’t need to touch the cork to keep it moist, because the cells are made of waxy material that’s waterproof. That Burgundy guy was just wrong, but he had probably believed that all his life and it’s more comforting for people to continue believing things than changing their minds.
Maybe I’m just too cynical and QPR-oriented, but I have to ask. Could it be that the Burg producer is trying to make sure that his wines, if $$$$, have every possible advantage via the most delicate handling, etc.?
Also wonder how and if the wine store(s) monitor turnover to make sure no really good juice is stored upright to protect their investment.
Certainly, my most expensive wines go into my temp-controlled cooler. And, all screwcap wines are stored upright. Multiple contacts in the trade support vertical storage for screwcaps.
Random thoughts based on years of collecting. Frugally.
If no oxygen at all enters through the cork then why do magnums age more slowly than 750s? Explanation for that has always been that there is more liquid for the entering oxygen to diffuse through. Or is that a myth too?
I’m with you, mostly. The one bit of contrary evidence I can think of is that corks do sometimes shrink with age – either in their entirety or just at one end. And that seems most common with poorly stored old wines. Is that not due to drying out? It’s hard to see how just one end could contract unless there some desiccation.
Perhaps that’s just a cork quality issue. The corks on some Clape Cornas from the mid-80s shrank, even when well stored. I had that experience with my own bottles and bottles that other people served. Some corks just dropped into the bottle when people attempted to pull them.
Some oxygen comes out of a cork in the first two or three months after bottling. After that, a good natural cork does not allow much oxygen ingress, but not all corks are good (they vary quite a lot). Experiments in Australia showed the the old (not good) synthetic corks allowed oxygen through the body of the closure, while oxygen ingress for natural corks was mainly around the edges caused by an imperfect seal between the cork and the glass.
There are lots of studies. The most oxygen infusion is in the first few months, as Al notes. That is from 1)the piston-like action of the cork being inserted, 2)the oxygen already beaten into the wine through the fill process, and most importantly, 3)the oxygen already contained in the cork diffusing into the wine.
Some of the studies are incomplete because of what they measure. In some cases, they put a cork into a bottle neck but there is no bottle. They measure permeability of gas from one side to another. In other cases they put chemicals that change color into complete bottles and measure oxygen permeability through that way. In others they put sensors into full bottles and measure oxygen permeability that way.
There is a LOT of variation in corks because they are not manufactured, they’re “found” in a sense. Also, because cork is such a heterogeneous material, if you were to slice an individual cork stopper into disks a few millimeters thick, the diffusion of oxygen through one slice, if any, would not be representative of the diffusion through the whole stopper.
And as Al notes, there is ingress through the bottle/cork interface, not through the cork itself. The studies I’ve seen contradict each other - some show significant and others insignificant diffusion.
As to shrinking, there has been a lot of research into corks since the 1990s. The growth of the wine industry and resulting demand for corks and resulting flood of second-rate material made people look for alternatives and made the cork industry acknowledge that they had problems. My guess is that the old corks were pretty much assumed to be just fine and the quality control was nowhere near what it is today. The industry has moved light years ahead of where it was just 20 years ago, in large part because of the outcry of people who were experiencing flawed wine resulting from faulty corks.
John, my experience with very old, shrunken corks is that they shrink from the inside (wet) end of the cork, not the end exposed to the air. This would imply that something in the wine (acid?) gradually eats at the cork. I have never seen a cork shrivel up on the outside while maintaining a good seal in contact with the wine.
I’m going from memory here, but I thought that when I listened to the IDTT episode with the (founder, CEO, spokesperson, something like that) of DIAM, he stated that there is some amount of oxygen transfer through cork (as compared, for example, to screwcap or crown cap) and that one of his selling points was that different DIAM models had different (but known) rates of oxygen transfer, as compared to natural cork where there it can be variable from one cork to the next.
The notion that most of the transfer happens between the cork and the glass, rather than through the cork, makes intuitive sense to me, but if different DIAM corks have different rates of transfer this calls that into question, unless the difference in the models is how well they form a seal against the glass.
Of course, all of this could have been sales pitch as well. It was on a podcast, not at a scientific conference with test results handed out to back up his claims. Or I could be mis-remembering.
I think Diam and other synthetic closures now pitch the fact that they offer predictable oxygen transfer. i doubt he gave a fixed rate for corks, because there’s too much variability. As others have said, some are perfect seals, some are far from perfect. With or without justification, many winemakers believe that a little oxygen intrusion is a good think, so Diam et al offer them products that allow them to pick their rate.
I assume now that horizontal storage was at first a practical convention. All ideas about how it affected the enclosure came after that.
You can store a lot more bottles in a confined space of an old cellar by laying them on their side and stacking them after all than you could standing them up.
It’s only after cardboard boxes came around that storing and shipping bottles vertically is even a thing.
I would think a temperature and humidity consistent cellar that none of it matters. Outside of that you might see some differences due to inconsistent pressure and temperatures effecting some small number of corks that might be on the edge of of a good seal.
My wines are boxed in my offsite storage for easy tracking/binning. I put those on their sides mostly because it makes access easier. If I had a huge cellar of sealed cases I was burying for years I think I might just stack them upright.