Divergent Kinetic Modeling of Wine Aging Across Bulk Storage and Bottle Environments

Physicochemical transformations in wine aging are strongly influenced by storage environment and scale. While kinetic modeling has been extensively applied to bulk aging systems, bottle aging is often treated as a continuation of cellar evolution despite representing a different physicochemical regime. A reaction-kinetics framework was applied to assess whether wine aging in bulk and bottle environments can be described by a unified model or instead requires divergent quantitative descriptions. A Sangiovese red wine was aged for six months under controlled conditions in inert bulk systems (stainless steel and a non-porous composite material), a porous bulk system (raw earthenware), and glass bottles. Key physicochemical parameters, including dissolved oxygen, oxidation–reduction potential, free sulfur dioxide, anthocyanins, polymerized pigments, and colorimetric indices, were monitored through non-invasive and laboratory analysis. Exploratory multivariate analysis showed that inert systems follow overlapping compositional trajectories, indicating stable chemical evolution, whereas bottle-aged wines exhibited greater variability. Kinetic analysis revealed comparable oxygen-limited behavior and buffered oxidation–reduction evolution in inert bulk systems, whilst bottle aging displayed different oxygen and sulfur dioxide dynamics, consistent with scale effects and altered oxygen partitioning. Overall, bottle aging cannot be reliably predicted by extrapolation of bulk storage kinetics and requires boundary-condition-aware descriptors accounting for scale and environmental constraints.