Flashback to two weeks ago when we were moving our possessions to a storage unit prior to leaving for this trip. We put most of our wine bottles into storage, but a handful were way past their prime and we couldn't justify storing them longer. Among others, we had a bottle labeled "Great Wall" that we bought during a 2007 trip to China, a "Plantation Red" Hawaiian wine we picked up on our honeymoon in 2004, and a Utah bottle I purchased at a convenience store during a mountain biking trip to Moab with my friend Nick. One of the bottles lived with us in Spokane, then traveled by UHaul to Arizona, then was driven to our New York apartment seven years ago by my dad.

Over the years we'd intended to open these "odds and ends" wines but never got around to it. Then we intended to open them during the weeks prior to leaving for our trip but never got around to it. (This was largely because our move turned out much crazier than expected mainly due to (a) us living in a fifth floor walk up apartment and (b) me being too cheap to hire a moving company.)

As a result, the day we left for the airport, after I made made an early morning trip to our Jersey City storage unit with the last of our stuff, I ran over to the corner bodega and bought a wine opener since we had packed ours. We used the last of our paper cups for a tasting.

To be sure, the wines tasted terrible. I spit almost every mouthful into the sink, and I'm not a discriminating wine drinker. Not to mention that we had to sample ten wines in ten minutes at 10:30am prior to rushing out the door.

Nicole and I originally learned about wine by reading Dorothy Gaiter's and John Brecher's bygone Wall Street Journal wine column. (Sidenote: Their book Love By The Glass is awesome.) They regularly encouraged their readers to open special bottles as a way of making ordinary days celebration worthy. They even held an "Open That Bottle Night" once per year as a reminder to open special bottles rather than let them collect dust.

In hindsight, we now know we should have heeded this advice! Although we had fun with our ten wines in ten minutes, paper cup tasting, it wasn't really enough time to reminisce about our trip to China, honeymoon, or biking in Moab, and each of the wines should have been opened years earlier in their prime.

So a lesson to our future selves. Open that bottle! Drink the wine! Carpe diem (and in vino veritas)! :)

Like this post? Want to read more about Travis and Nicole's travel adventures? Check out Wine Tasting In Beaujolais -- A Different Side Of Burgundy.

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