big bottles for big beers?

I was just wondering if anyone has noticed a difference in bigger beers that need more aging time that were aged in larger (than 12 oz's) bottles as compared to the normal 12ers. I just drank the last bottle of a dubbel i brewed over the summer and i noticed that the bigger bottles seemed to taste better....have people out there found that for longer aging, bigger bottles are better? i was thinking that this would make sense because there is less oxygen in the bottle for a lager amount of beer so perhaps that would make it age more smoothly? is this why so many belgian and strong beers come in larger bottles? I have a trippel coming up that is going to take a significant amount of time to age and was just pondering this question. I like to have some 12 oz bottles on hand as testers, but i was thinking about bottling most of the batch in bigger bottles for the longer aging period. Just wondering what people think about this.
Thanks

Not quite sure about this---though I do know that wine in larger format bottles ages better than smaller ones.

Not sure if it truly aged better, but when I was bottling I always filled a 1.5L magnum to hold on to for a while, save for special occasion, whatever.

I suspect there is something to that. Hair of the Dog specializes in big beers and big bottles. On the other hand, dealing with a 1.5L bottle of barleywine is way outside my capacity.

I've always found that aging in bulk - bulk in this thread being entirely relative - was better than aging in the final package.

In spirits, the liquid once bottled goes through no further changes in its flavor and aroma characteristics.

In wine and beer, unfiltered beverages change character in the bottle, but much less dramatically than if stored in a larger container. Beverages that have been filtered fine enough to strip the living organisms are sufficiently stabilized that little positive improvement takes place.

So is it possible that a 22-oz. bottle changes character in a different way than a 12-oz.? Yeah. Actually, I think it's pretty cool that you can taste the difference! I'm not sure I could.

Cheers,

Bob

P.S. +1 to not liking the prospect of knocking off a 40 of Barleywine.