(Bonappetit) - If you poke around certain corners of the Internet, you’ll find all sorts of tricks for speeding up the wine-chilling process. One theory prescribes wrapping a bottle of wine in a wet towel before popping it in the freezer. Another postulates that bottles will chill more quickly stored horizontally than vertically—because “thermodynamics.” As someone who has neither a wine cellar nor a wine refrigerator, but drinks an inordinate amount of wine, these seem like useful bits of information...if true. To find out if these methods were actual scientific strategies for enthusiastic drinkers with poor planning skills or total cocktail party bullshit, I tracked down two patient physicists: Barnard College’s Tim Halpin-Healy and Greg Blonder, a professor of design and product engineering at Boston University. And I also checked in with Belinda Chang, partner and director of wine at Maple & Ash in Chicago.