This is what OTBN is all about – life, friends, love and wines that tell stories, hold memories. We invented OTBN a quarter-century ago because all of us have wines that are so special to us and, in some cases, we can’t bear to open them because they are too precious. Our advice: Let those memories out. Any time is a great time to uncork those bottles, but we understand that sometimes we need support, and that’s what the OTBN community is all about.
open that bottle night
March 08, 2024
January 26, 2024We created OTBN in 1999 (a quarter-century ago) because readers kept asking us the same question: I have this one very special bottle of wine that has great memories for me; when should I open it? We realized everybody has that bottle and the only way we were ever going to pop the cork was to take a deep breath and do it together.
March 10, 2023Wine should be joyful. If you ever think it becomes routine to people in the industry, we’d urge you to look at the picture of Marcus Notaro as he celebrates Open That Bottle Night. Notaro is the head winemaker at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and quite famous, but when it came to OTBN, he was like a kid in a candy store and it shows on his face.
“I enjoy celebrating Open That Bottle Night each year. I chose the 1997 S.L.V. as it’s from a benchmark vintage in Napa Valley and the wines in the mid-’90s are in a sweet spot right now,” he told us. (His lovely video of tasting the wine is on Twitter @StagsLeapCASK23.)(Marcus Notaro)
Winemakers from all over – Singlefile Wines in Australia, Domaine Gayda in Languedoc – opened special bottles, too. And it wasn’t just winemakers, of course. OTBN was celebrated by regular wine-loving folks from El Salvador, to Chicago to South ...
February 24, 2023Only the oldest of Miami old-timers will remember that there used to be a Grand Union on Coral Way. It was replaced long ago by a sad mall. We lived in Miami then and bought some of our wines at that Grand Union. On Jan. 3, 1980, we picked up a bottle of Always Elvis, an Italian white we carefully noted as “non-vintage,” for $3.29.
February 10, 2023We created OTBN in 1999 for a simple reason: When we started writing about wine, the question we received most often was “I have this one special bottle that I got on vacation (or at my wedding, or at an auction…) When do I open it?” Our answer was always: NOW! But we realized it’s not that easy. Sometimes, the longer we save a bottle “for a special occasion,” the bigger the special occasion has to become and the memories and joy inside that bottle get trapped forever.
March 12, 2021Categories: FeaturesGiven the state of the world, we never would have guessed this, but Open That Bottle Night 2021 reached new heights, celebrated by wine stores from Massachusetts to Singapore, by wineries from Australia to Tuscany and by shut-in-for-too-long people from Jamaica to Sonoma.
February 12, 2021We’ve heard it over and over during the past year: “Now every night is Open That Bottle Night!” In the midst of such a horrific year, people decided to finally enjoy those bottles of wine that had been just too special to open.
March 27, 2020"Like a surprising number of people, our own prescription for getting through this involves calming down with a glass of wine – and, in this case, the good stuff." Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher
March 27, 2020“We’ve been pairing our wines to our movie selections. First, a 2015 Williams Selyem Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and ‘Casablanca’ — Morocco is on the coast so figured we’d have a coastal wine." Lynn Penner-Ash
March 13, 2020Wine “has the capacity to lift us out of ourselves by its beauty. The appreciation of that beauty elevates our life through wine.” --Warren Winiarski, on OTBN 2020
