Seriously missed that thread! Or I’ve blocked it out.
I don’t think it’s come up recently. I do remember standing bottles up for storage as a time honored controversy.
Charlie brings up a couple of different points I would like to comment on.
First, I absolutely agree that old wines need time to “stretch”, or blow off bottle funk, or whatever you want to call it. If I’m serving them at home, I’ve planned for that so they’ve been allowed to stand. With bottles that are 25+ years old, I will always slow ox them for a time to allow that, and then decant them through cheese cloth within an hour of service.
If I’m traveling to an event with the wine, I also double decant back into the bottle, having given the bottle a wash inside with water and a vigorous shake out. If that doesn’t dislodge the sediment stuck to the side, nothing will so I ignore it. I’ll also give the refilled bottle a shot of that nitrogen-in-a-can stuff if I have it (can’t recall the name).
None of that really helps though with the OP’s initial point, which was deciding to open a bottle on the spur of the moment. This is why I recommended handling the wine as gently as possible and rotating it vertical gently before decanting it. Here too I would use cheese cloth.
There’s a substantial difference between the Audouze method and a double decant (and water addition) to a beautiful old wine that’s just been woken up from a long slumber.
It’s because you need a sufficiently large number of otherwise identical bottles, capable of long aging, that have spent their entire lives on their side, and another set of bottles that have spent a sufficiently long period of time standing up to allow many comparisons to come to a reasonable conclusion. Right?