The Bottle I Regret Not Opening

Image Credit: Imagination Wine Cellars

There is a bottle sitting somewhere in my cellar that I have owned for years and still have not opened. I will not pretend I do not know exactly which one. I simply will not say. Not out of secrecy, but because it is not really about that bottle. Almost everyone who cares about wine has one of these. The point is never the label. It is the waiting.

I know exactly why I have not opened it. I have been saving it for the right moment, a phrase that sounds perfectly sensible until you say it aloud often enough to notice how strange it actually is. What, precisely, is the right moment? There have been good years since I bought it. Good dinners. Good news, more than once. Every one of those evenings I decided, quietly and without really examining the decision, that this was not quite it, that something better was presumably still coming, and the bottle should wait for that instead.

Nothing better has come. Or rather, plenty of good things have come, and each time I decided they were not good enough.

This is the part worth being honest about. Saving a bottle for the right moment is very often just a polite way of never opening it. The moment does not arrive because we have quietly defined it as something a little better than whatever is actually happening in front of us. It is a soft kind of self denial dressed up as good taste.

I think about this every time I write about restraint, because it would be easy to mistake restraint for hoarding. They are not the same thing at all. Restraint is choosing the better bottle over three lesser ones. Hoarding is choosing no bottle at all, indefinitely, in favour of a fantasy evening that never quite arrives.

I have watched other people do the opposite. Open something extraordinary for no occasion whatsoever, simply because it was a Tuesday and they were hungry and the bottle was there. There is a particular kind of person who does this well, without ceremony and without apology, and I have always envied it a little. It never once seemed like waste. It seemed like the only sensible way to treat a good bottle.

The whole philosophy behind this project, not more, better, has a shadow side if you take it too literally. The idea that because something is exceptional it must be reserved for an exceptional occasion. But an ordinary Tuesday, opened with intention, can become the occasion. The bottle does not need the evening to already be special. Very often it is the thing that makes it so.

I do not know if I will open mine this year. I suspect I will find another reason not to. A habit, once formed, is difficult to talk yourself out of, even when you can see with total clarity exactly what you are doing.

But I wanted to write this down, mostly as a note to myself, and perhaps to you too, if you have a bottle like this sitting somewhere, wrapped and waiting and quietly gathering the wrong kind of meaning. The good ones are for drinking. Not more. Better, and better, sometimes, simply means now.