As Davelcorp rightly suggested -- this should be a topic on its own.

To answer Mike Petro's question -- I was defining wet storage the way
people in the trade seem to define it in Hong Kong, meaning that it is
stored in a dark, high humidity storage space that's usually in the
basement or near a hill (i.e. a building that's built on a slope, so
the ground floor is essentially in a basement type environment).
Humidity is usually at 80% or higher in these places, but not so much
that the walls are dripping with water. In fact, I was reading in an
issue of puerh-teapot where they talked about storage and how they
actually try to control the humidity through the use of chalk, I
believe, by spreading it on the ground so that it will soak up some
moisture lest it gets too moist.

Then after this treatment, usually lasting one to a few years, the tea
will be taken out of this storage space and placed in a dry storage
environment, typically called, literally "recede storage", i.e. to get
rid of the nasty smell of the wet storage. It takes longer than the
wet storage phase itself.

At the end of that, the product you've got is a tea that is well aged,
will usually yield a liquor of bright to dark red colour (depending on
the tea, I believe, and the amount of wet storage it got), somewhat
sweet, has the nice "chen" aroma that we are familiar with, etc.

I've had wet storage teas that I don't find offensive at all. In fact,
they are quite mellow, nice, flavourful (better than cooked puerh).
They look nastier than dry storage stuff. They're usually duller in
its appearance (whereas dry storage pu is shinier on the surface).
They have less of the dry "bite". But it doesn't mean it's bad.

I think the obviously bad ones are usually the ones that do get mouldy.
That, however, is not the goal of wet storage. Some will tell you
that's good for aging the tea, going so far as to say these are what
they call "sugar coating" (the white mould). And indeed, mouldy tea
with white stuff on it do taste sweeter, but again, it's not the goal
of the storage process, as far as I am aware.

I went to a traditional HK teashop during the summer where they
specialize in wet storage puerh. Some of the cakes I tried had white
mould on it. They don't taste half bad. Looks bad, but if I don't
show you the original cake, you probably won't know.

I think any tea over 20 years of age that claim to be "pure dry
storage" should be taken with a grain of salt, at the very least. The
idea of "pure dry storage" really didn't come into currency until
later, and in the 80s people were wet storing everything. In fact,
they would consider that to be the proper way to handle a puerh cake.
That's why I say most of the older vintage stuff you or I have had have
probably gone through some amount of wet storage. There are, of
course, dry stored stuff out there that are old. You can sort of tell,
sometimes, by the way the leaves are when brewed, etc, but it's not
always very obvious, especially if it's only a sample. I certainly by
no means am good at telling them apart.