What a countertop rack is for
The bottles in rotation. The four or six you opened this week or will open this month, kept somewhere sensible and visible instead of lying on a worktop or standing in a cupboard door.
That is a genuinely useful job, and it is a different job from storing a collection. Judge a countertop rack on footprint, stability and whether it gets in your way — not on capacity.
Fold away or stack up
Two opposite philosophies, and which one is right depends on whether your constraint is space or growth.
The Sunnydaze folding rack is eight bottles in powder-coated iron, and it collapses flat — to a published 1.75 inches tall. Nothing else here does that. Eight bottles covers a dinner party, and when the dinner is over the rack goes in a drawer. If your counter is contested territory, that is the deciding feature.
The Amazon Basics tabletop rack is the opposite bet: a 4-bottle black steel tier that stacks, with no assembly at all. Start with four bottles; add tiers later and the rack grows rather than being replaced — the manufacturer publishes the stack at three tiers, so twelve bottles is the stated ceiling. The recessed wave holders stop bottles rolling, which flat coated wire at this price does not.
The honest caveat on stacking: a stacked rack is only as stable as the surface under it and the care with which it is stacked. On a solid counter, fine. On a wobbling shelf, not.
Why this is not storage
A countertop rack puts bottles in the warmest, brightest part of the house. Kitchen counters sit near ovens, hobs and windows, and kitchens swing several degrees through a day of cooking. For a bottle you will open this week, that is irrelevant. For a bottle you are keeping six months, it is the worst spot in the building.
So use these for rotation and put the keeping bottles somewhere cool and dark — a floor rack in a cooler room, or a cabinet if the room cannot be trusted. The comparison is in rack vs fridge, and what temperature swings actually do is covered in wine storage temperature. If the counter is the only surface you have, the small-space rack comparison ranks every format here on published footprint.
If the counter is not the right surface after all, the next shelf to try is in the pantry, where the binding constraint is depth rather than footprint: best wine racks for a pantry.