Should wine be stored on its side? The real answer

On its side for a natural cork you mean to keep for years. Either way for a screw cap. Either way for Champagne, on the Comité Champagne's own published advice.

So should wine be stored on its side? Yes for corked bottles in long-term storage, but not for the reason you have heard. The cork does not dry out from the inside. Miguel Cabral, director of research and development at the cork producer Amorim, told the MUST Fermenting Ideas conference in Cascais that the cork will never dry out with almost 100 percent humidity in the head-space, so it is a myth that you need to store a bottle on its side. The real reasons are duller and better: it is how cases and bonded warehouses handle stock, it puts any seepage in your line of sight, and the one measurable penalty for standing bottles up turned up in wines sealed with agglomerated cork. Position is a tiebreaker. Temperature is what ruins bottles.

Why should wine be stored on its side?

Because of how the trade handles stock, not because of what the cork does.

Fine wine moves and sells in twelve-bottle wooden cases lying flat on racking, and an unbroken original case can be sold as exactly that. Break it to stand the bottles up and you have traded that description for shelf space. Horizontal also keeps the cork and the capsule in your line of sight, so a weep of wine under the foil shows itself early, while it is still a stain rather than a change in fill level.

There is one genuine mechanical argument on the pro-horizontal side, and it is old. The Australian Wine Research Institute notes the recommendation that "bottled wine be stored with the cork in contact with the wine in a cool (15–20°C), dry location", summarising Amon and Simpson from 1986. The AWRI describes the failure mode that recommendation guards against: "wines under natural closures can dry out and leakage can occur if the air is too dry; however, in most storage facilities humidity is not adjusted." Note where the drying happens in that sentence. It is the cellar air on the outside of the cork, not the headspace on the inside.

That is why the serious storage specs fix humidity rather than bottle angle. The Comité Champagne specifies a range of "between 60% and 80%". Jancis Robinson notes that "75% humidity is often cited as ideal" while "there is very little significant research to definitively establish an optimal range".

What did the storage-position studies actually find?

Very little, and the little they found does not all point the same way.

The AWRI reports two trials directly. Skouroumounis and colleagues in 2005 followed a Riesling and a wooded Chardonnay for five years: "the bottle orientation (horizontal or upright) was shown to have little effect on the chemical composition and sensory properties of the two wines across a 60-month period." Mas and colleagues in 2002 found that "after 24 months wines stored upright had higher yellow/brown colour (measured by OD420nm absorbances) than those stored horizontally; however, the differences were not significant." The exception is the one worth remembering: in that trial "oxidation was higher for upright samples sealed with agglomerated cork stoppers, with elevated acetaldehyde levels seen in white wine samples from the 3-month timepoint onwards."

The physics arrived later. Chanut, Bellat, Gougeon and Karbowiak, publishing in PNAS Nexus in 2023, tracked oxygen crossing microagglomerated stoppers and the bottleneck around them for 24 months and concluded that the position of the bottle during storage, vertical (i.e. cork in contact with the vapor phase of the model wine) or horizontal (i.e. cork in contact with the liquid phase), does not influence the oxygen transfer. The same team's follow-up in Science Advances in 2026, led by Julie Chanut, mapped "four main mechanisms": a fast redistribution of oxygen in the first days, a release of oxygen held in the cork's own cells that is "largely completed after nine months", a phase from roughly four to fifteen months in which phenolics leaking out of the cork consume oxygen, and then slow permeation from outside that runs for years through the cork and through "microscopic gaps where the glass meets the stopper".

Those gaps are the point. The 2023 work found that with model wine present the glass-to-cork interface accounted for nearly 75% of total oxygen transfer, against 35% of the total in the dry condition without wine, and Karbowiak's 2019 paper in npj Science of Food had already flagged that "the transfer occurring at the interface between the glass and the stopper may significantly contribute to oxygen ingress into the bottle". Your bottle's weak point runs around the outside of the cork. Rotating the bottle does not move it.

One study found something the folklore does not predict at all. A 2014 Vintage Port sat under natural cork for 44 months in a controlled cellar averaging 18°C and 60% humidity, according to Azevedo, Pinto, Teixeira and colleagues in Foods in 2022. Bottles lying down showed significantly higher total proanthocyanidins at 15 months and higher tannin specific activity at 44 months, and a cork-derived compound, Corklin, turned up "in trace amounts in wines stored in the horizontal position" only. Colour did not differ. Horizontal storage put more cork chemistry into the wine, in a style like Taylor's Vintage Port that is built to sit for forty years. Whether you read that as complexity or contamination, it is not the result the dried-cork story predicts.

Can wine be stored upright?

Yes, and for anything you will drink inside a year or two the question does not arise.

For long holds the honest position is that the evidence is thin in both directions. Cabral's case is that the humidity story is backwards: the humidity of the environment around the bottle won't have any influence, because the cork is influenced by the humidity inside the bottle. On his account, storing wine on its side won't prevent corks from drying out and may even accelerate their degeneration. Against that sits long trade practice, the fact that the published trials run to five years rather than fifty, and the plain risk that a bottle standing in a dry room has its cork exposed to that room on one side.

Where upright is unambiguously right: any bottle you are about to serve. Berry Bros. & Rudd's decanting guide says to "stand the wine up for 12 hours ideally; this will allow any sediment to settle at the bottom of the bottle". A mature Pétrus pulled straight from horizontal racking has its deposit smeared along the flank, and no amount of careful pouring recovers that.

How to store wine with a cork

Start with the closure, then set the position. A natural cork on a wine you plan to hold for a decade goes on its side, in the dark, at a stable temperature, in air that is not arid. A technical or agglomerated cork gets the same treatment with less margin for error, since that is the one closure type where standing bottles up produced a measurable oxidation penalty in trial. The closure comparison guide covers which wines get which.

Producers track this themselves. Penfolds runs re-corking clinics available "for all cork closure Penfolds red wines, aged fifteen years or older", grading eligibility on a four-zone ullage scale where amber "requires re-corking" and red means the wine "is no longer certifiable and will not be re-corked". A programme that exists only for cork-closed bottles tells you which variable the winery thinks is doing the work.

Do screw caps and screw-cap agers need to lie down?

No. The seal is a liner compressed against the glass, and there is nothing in it to keep wet.

Wine Spectator's Dr. Vinny says it in one line: "Screwcaps don't need to be kept moist to remain effective." Upright is the better default, because it saves rack depth and keeps any deposit sitting in the punt rather than along the side of the bottle.

This matters more than it used to, because screw caps are no longer a supermarket closure. Grosset is the reason: Jeffrey Grosset "a driving force behind a decision in 2000 by Clare Valley Riesling producers to switch over to Screw cap closures for their wines". The entire Grosset range is now released under screw cap, and he established the Australian Closure Fund to encourage research comparing closure types. Clare Valley Riesling from that decision is twenty-six years into bottle. If you are cellaring those, stand them up and reclaim the space.

Should Champagne and Port be stored on their side?

Champagne, either way, and the appellation body says so itself. The Comité Champagne's storage guidance reads: "Bottles can be stored upright or on their sides", "in a cool place, at a constant temperature of between 10 and 15°C", with humidity "high and constant, between 60% and 80%", and the bottle "protected from light, vibrations and odours".

The Union des Maisons de Champagne describes the mechanism: "Champagne can be stored on its side or upright since the pressure inside the bottle will keep the cork moist and the seal intact in either case." Gas pressure holds the cork against the glass whichever way the bottle points. So for anything from the Champagne producer atlas, including a long-ageing prestige bottling like Krug Grande Cuvée, position is a shelving decision.

Vintage Port is the one style where the case for horizontal is about the drinking rather than the chemistry. It throws a heavy deposit, and a bottle stored on its side lays that crust along one flank, which you can then pour off cleanly, provided you stand it up first and give it the settling time Berry Bros. & Rudd recommends. Mark the upper side of the bottle before you move it and you keep the crust where you left it.

How to store wine bottles when position is the least of it

Fix temperature before you argue about angle. The AWRI states the limits bluntly: "any storage place where the temperature exceeds 25°C for long periods and 40°C for short periods can affect wine quality", "temperatures in excess of 40°C will induce visual and sensory changes to a wine in only a matter of days", and "thermal cycling where the temperature varies significantly between day and night should be avoided".

Heat also attacks the exact joint the oxygen research identified. In the 2023 PNAS Nexus work, storage at 35°C left the barrier intact for nine months and then opened up a significant transfer at the glass-cork interface, while 24 months at 20°C left position making no measurable difference at all. A bottle stored upright at 12°C beats a bottle stored on its side in a kitchen rack, and the gap is not close.

The rest of the checklist sits in the long-term storage guide. Whether storage history shows up in what a case actually fetches is a question for the ledger, not for folklore.

Know when to open it, not just how to lay it down

Getting the position right buys you nothing if you miss the window. The bottle you laid down carefully in 2009 has a date after which every further year of perfect storage is a year of decline, and that date moves as critics revise and as the people actually drinking the wine report back.

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