On Time, Memory, and Wine

And the process of letting go.

Like many people, I’ve held onto the empty bottles of “important” wines I’ve drunk. Until recently, this 26-bottle collection—my “Wall of Pride” —adorned the top of my refrigerator and kitchen cabinets.

These empties included several Grand and Premier Cru Burgundies from top estates and excellent years, an ’82 Margaux, a Sassicaia…you get the idea.

But recently I’ve begun letting them go. Or, rather, actively “deaccessioning” them, telling myself it’s time to grow up and move on. I no longer remember in detail how any of them tasted, although notes exist in a notebook somewhere that I haven’t cracked open in years.

I got rid of the red-wine bottles a couple of weeks ago. I just brought a few white-wine bottles to the recycling bin down the hall. I’m saving the Champagnes for last; those had more meaning to me, generally, although I didn’t drink them on occasions any more notable than I did the other wines.

I assembled quite a collection over the years, starting about a decade ago and tapering off a few years later. With a few exceptions, most of them came from a single source: Someone I knew had access to some astounding bottles, and we would drink them together with relative frequency. Not for any special occasion, mind you; more as an accompaniment to a normal Sunday-night takeout dinner.

They came to me at a time when I was relatively new to drinking high-end wine, to drinking to discern minute nuances of flavor rather than as an efficient method of numbing my brain. I didn’t appreciate these wines the way they deserved to be appreciated. I enjoyed them, to be sure, but a part of me wishes I could have saved them for a later year, when my palate would have been more trained and educated and my appreciation of them greater.

But perhaps they were, in fact, how I eventually developed my palate to such a fine-tuned degree.

In any case, now all I have are the empty bottles.

I like to think I’m generally pretty smart, but I have zero memory for names, dates, flavors, or anything else that might allow me to succeed in the wine world professionally; I rely on notes for everything. (This also applies to everyday life, not just wine, although I do have a terrifyingly good memory for conversations and old song lyrics. I’m also like 75% face blind, which bites me in the ass constantly.)

I tend to hold onto things—souvenirs from various trips, and the like—because a visible, tangible reminder is the best way to reignite memories in my brain. But I recently looked at my collection of empty bottles and realized that very few of these bottles conjured specific memories for me any longer. It was, I figured, time to let them go.

The friend who acquired the wines and with whom I drank them has requested a small handful of the empties I’m ridding myself of for his own Shelf of Pride. I started writing this the day after that person’s birthday earlier this week. We see each other far less frequently now; he’s moved uptown, a long schlep from my South Brooklyn apartment. When we do hang out, we’re more likely to drink a bottle from some inexpensive-but-culty small producer.

This person doesn’t get attached to things—to me, an enviable trait. I don’t have illusions that he’ll hold onto any of the empties for longer than a year or two, until he replaces each with something “cooler.” For him, they’re symbols of bragging rights, not memory-joggers.

Meanwhile, I feel as though I’m losing something with each batch I bring to the recycling bin down the hall. I couldn’t tell you what; the delicious juice within is long gone. The bottles mean near-nothing to me now, whether as bragging items or as souvenirs or memory prompts. What, then, is inducing these feelings of loss?

Perhaps it’s because I miss the stage of life I was in when I drank those bottles, a decade ago: younger, stupider, more content, more carefree. More prone to making mistakes, certainly, but also less likely to face serious consequences from them. My life trajectory was closer to a vertical line than a horizontal one.

I miss those times: The two of us (plus my now-departed cat) sitting on my then-new sofa in the first apartment I ever had all to myself, listening to an album I loved and getting drunk on absurdly good wine. Being young and dumb and ignorantly happy.

Collectively, those empty bottles in my kitchen serve as souvenirs of time rather than of place.

There are no photos of those hangouts. They were too ordinary and common to be worth documenting, we believed. There are only the empty bottles.

I don’t drink nearly as much wine anymore. To me, opening a bottle of wine is a social thing, not to be done alone, but distance has dulled my wine-drinking friendships. The person with whom I now drink most frequently these days prefers cocktails or spirits. (I don’t prefer one over the other; whatever’s delicious is delicious. There should be a word for this. Panalcophilic?)

So what, then, will serve in the future as a tangible reminder of who I am now? Will I want to look back, on some future date, and remember these ordinary moments that, taken together, comprise a life? If so, with what? I don’t save the empty bottles of the everyday amari I finish. Perhaps I’m unknowingly compiling a collection of a different sort that will serve the same purpose, although tote bags or branded T-shirts seem infinitely less romanticizable.

But in the meantime, perhaps I’ll hold onto a couple of those special empties. I may not remember the specific tasting notes or the precise (non-)occasion on which they were consumed. But I do at least remember the younger version of myself who drank them and think of her fondly.