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.