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My option on it is this advice is dangerous and could ruin it. My reasons for feeling this are as follows:

• Liquids boil at higher temperatures the higher the pressure. Water in a near vacuum can be boiled with the heat of your hands, whereas water at the bottom of the ocean, under very high pressure does not boil even from the heat of molten lava! The high pressure in sparkling wine means less of the wine will evaporate into the air gap between the cork and wine, making it less humid and causing the cork to dry out.
  
  
• While the high pressure inside the bottle will not allow much oxygen from the outside air into the bottle to ruin the wine (due to the high positive pressure differential), the drier cork which may shrink, will be more permeable to the carbon dioxide in the bottle allowing it to escape. This will cause the sparkling wine to go flatter faster.
  
  
• Once the wine starts to become less fizzy, more gasses will be exchanged with the outside air allowing greater and greater amounts of oxygen in. This oxygen will be absorbed by the alcohol creating vinegar, dropping the pressure even more, causing more carbon dioxide to be released and escape.
  
  
• All in all this will start a chain reaction of event that will cause the sparkling wine to go flat and become ruined, though it will take a while.
  

On the other hand the high initial pressure will stop the oxygen getting in so sparkling wine will survive upright longer than a non-sparkling wine would; so perhaps for short term storage this would be fine.

However I feel anything vintage or that you will store for a while should be stored lying down to prolong its life. If you are going to store a wine for any length of time you should, by default, store it lying down as you never know, you may keep it for while.

Also if you open a 10 year old bottle of fizz, it is not at fizzy as a young bottle so the preventative  forces at work will not be as strong.

Does anyone agree or disagree? Is there anything I’ve missed haven’t considered, could be clearer about or just got plain wrong?