Recently Joy and I had the opportunity to have dinner with Steve, a close friend from my debate coaching era. We had reconnected through Facebook and discovered that mutually, in our ‘post-coaching lives’, both of us had gravitated to the wine industry.
Even more recently, Steve (the friend) has asked some advice regarding an upcoming wine trip to Italy that he is organizing for a group of enthusiasts. Joy and I had traveled through many of the same regions he was visiting, and he was seeking our insights as to approaches to wine tasting and local eateries. The trip sounds wonderful and has sparked our interest in returning to Italy to sample more wine, food, and culture.
More immediately, while reviewing our notes from weeks traveling through Italy, I remembered that we had multiple bottles of Brunello that had been waiting for decades to be opened. Joy was making lasagna and that, along with the prompt of Steve’s trip, justified opening a 1991 Fastelli. The vintage was modest, and the wine was on the decline. However, we enjoyed it with the Lasagna and reminisced about the trip during the which the wine was acquired and, with great fondness, the amusing wine shop/restaurant owner who sold us the bottle. The quality of the wine was far less important than the memories surrounding the acquisition.
How many more bottles like the Fastelli reside in the recesses of our cellar[GV1] ? We actually have wine coolers as there are no ‘real’ cellars in the Low Country of South Carolina. And, how many more memories are still to be resurrected? It is time to carefully cull the collection for those bottles. It is time to resurrect memories.
So, what is the right time to open that bottle you have been saving for a special occasion? How special is the bottle? And, more importantly, how special should be the occasion? The warning I offer is – don’t wait too long.
Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher “invented Open That Bottle Night”. The last of Saturday of February is set aside to “finally drink that wine that is otherwise simply too special to open”. Sadly, as I write this post, I realize that this is not the last Saturday of February. Darn. However, I did attend a neighborhood organized oyster roast tonight. And, I realized that an oyster roast would seem to be an excellent opportunity to open a ‘special bottle’. Luckily, the event felt like it was “the last Saturday of February”.
What I carried to the community ‘barn’ was a 2016 Napa Valley Quilt Cabernet. Not exactly an ‘oyster wine’, but Cabernet is always comfortable, and the neighbors with whom I shared it were not concerned that a Cab might have been too heavy for the oysters. The Quilt was in no way too heavy for the moment…or the memory.
Enough said … you get the point.