I’m going to tell you a real-life story, so top off your wine glass (or cold-pressed juice if that’s more your style) and pull up a chair.

The Husband and I were at a wine class last week (wine tasting = guaranteed date night success). The night got even better when the guy who was presenting, who happened to be from a fancy pants winery, alluded to the perils of having a “wine shrine.”

wine shrine
/wīn SHrīn/
noun
A carefully curated collection of “special” bottles of wine that are admired, organized, dusted, insured, discussed at dinner parties, and never opened.

Related forms:
shrine wine, noun—a bottle whose imagined future enjoyment now exceeds any possible actual enjoyment.

Usage note:
A wine shrine often begins with the noble phrase “We’ll open it someday” and ends with estate-sale randos shaking it (!) and asking, with toothpicks in their mouths, “Do you think this is still good?”

The presenter at the wine-soaked-date-night told two anecdotes I loved almost as much as the 2014 we were tasting:

• He gives his sister nice bottles from time to time (the perks of the job and all) and he lamented how she held on to the bottles (see wine shrine above), how she believed she needed a special occasion and believed the right day(s) would surely come… but just not now. (Sound familiar? And not just with wine—with other things in your life?)
• He gives his neighbors opened bottles of wine—bottles they’d open at the winery to taste just a glass from but not want to waste (the perks of the job and all). He said he knew those bottles would be enjoyed by his neighbors, precisely because they were opened, that they were beckoning to be finished. He knew they knew it would be blasphemous to waste a killer bottle that would go bad before their eyes if they didn’t consume it. He noted that these were the same people he’d given perfectly good, unopened bottles to—like his sister—who then sat on them for years, waiting for the “right” time.

Sure, sure, sure—some wines need to age. The Cabernet Sauvignons we were tasting warranted some time in a cellar, sure. But we know the difference between being reckless and opening a critically acclaimed wine the day after its bottling, and waiting 25 years for The Right Life Moment to happen.

In the wine world, there is a risk of saving a bottle past its peak… until it becomes a museum artifact with a crumbly cork. Are you past your peak in some parts of life? And even if you are still in your prime—your peak drinking window—are you enjoying and making the most of your life, or are you lying on your side to age in the back of a cabinet, to open years from now? (I trust you will give me grace with that metaphor.)

I have written about this before: Are You Enjoying—or Saving—the Good Stuff in Life, was an article right along these lines, and since it resonated with so many of you, I published Your Ideas for Savoring, Not Saving, Your Life. Other gems along the lines of STOP POSTPONING YOUR EXISTENCE: Are You Waiting to Live, Today is the Day You’ve Been Waiting For, Are You Waiting for an Encore in Life, OMG guys: this is essentially the gist of everything I’ve ever written or said.

So use that special perfume you’ve been rationing. Use the good cutlery that makes you feel fancy, even if (especially if!) it’s to eat Hamburger Helper on a Tuesday. Book the hiking trip before your knees betray you. Make your special Black Forest Cake when it’s not someone’s birthday. Wear the shoes that you’re afraid to scuff, because scuffed shoes show you are getting up and out and living. Register for the class before your brain crumbles like a waited-too-long-cork.

And above all, open that bottle.

Abolish the Wine Shrine! You with me?!? Let’s cheers to that.