Imagine if an evil genie took some of your very best memories and hid them in a wine bottle. That’s what so many of us do to ourselves. These dear bottles have a special way of retrieving warm and often-forgotten memories, but you have to pop the cork to release them. That’s why some wine enthusiasts invented Open That Bottle Night – the last Saturday in February. So very many of us have that special bottle — from a departed loved one, from a visit to a winery, from a vacation — that we’re always going to open at just the right moment, but, of course, that moment never comes. So the wine sits and sits and sits and becomes more and more precious, so it sits and sits some more.  Mark your calendars – February 26, 2011. 

Here is a “primer” for how to conduct your own “Open That Bottle Night”. 

1. Choose the setting. Many people have dinner parties and others take their bottles to restaurants that allow BYOB (and some restaurants have special OTBN promotions). It takes some planning. I love OTBN because it’s an excuse to open one or two of those killer bottles I’ve been saving.

2. Select the bottle. A huge part of the fun is choosing the bottle, pulling out these revered wines and remembering when, where and why you bought them. Each has a story. The point is not to show off with a great bottle or necessarily open the most prestigious bottle in the house, but to uncork a wine that holds cherished memories, the bottle that — admit it — you will never open otherwise. This is one case where it really is all about you, what the wine means to you, and not necessarily about its taste.

3. Stand it up. If you are going to open an older bottle, stand it up (away from light and heat, of course) for a few days before you plan to open it. This will allow the sediment, if there is some, to sink to the bottom of the bottle.

4. Beware of the temperature. Both reds and whites are often better somewhere closer to cellar temperature (around 55 degrees) than today’s room temperature. Don’t over chill the white, and think about putting the red in the refrigerator for an hour or two before opening it if you’ve been keeping it in a warm house.

5. Practice your technique. With an older bottle, the cork may break easily. The best opener for a cork like that is one with two prongs, but it requires some skill. You have time to practice using one. Be prepared for the possibility that a fragile cork may fall apart with a regular corkscrew. If that happens, have a carafe and a coffee filter handy. Just pour enough through the coffee filter to catch the cork’s fragments.

6. Otherwise, do not decant. We’re assuming these are old and fragile wines. Air could quickly dispel what’s left of them. If the wine does need to breathe, you should have plenty of time for that to happen as you drink it throughout the evening.

7. Have a backup wine ready for your special meal, in case your old wine really has gone bad.

8. Share. If you are having an OTBN party, ask everyone to say a few words about the significance of the wine they brought. This really is what OTBN is all about.

9. Serve dinner. Open the wine and immediately take a sip. If it’s truly, irretrievably bad — we mean vinegar — you will know it right away. But even if the wine doesn’t taste good at first, don’t rush to the sink to pour it out. You may be amazed how a wine became more delicious as the night wore on. Is it the air changing the wine or the company changing the mood? Who cares?

10. Enjoy the wine for what it is, not what it might someday be or might once have been. This is critical. But this isn’t about delicious wine, ultimately, but about delicious memories.