Last bottle regrets?

Do you ever get a sort of wistful, sad feeling when you realize that you are about the open your last bottle of something?

You may hae started out with a case or perhaps just two or three, but those bottles have given you pleasure, to one degree or another, over a period of time and, when they are gone, they are usually gone for good.

My lovely wife is making a Sunday roast beef dinner tonight and, what brought all this on, is I plan on opening a 1998 Darenberg Dead Arm Shiraz: the last bottle from a case of six I purchased a while ago.

While I am excited to open it and see how it has fared after 13 years, there is also a certain degree of sandness mixed in.

Am I alone in these conflicted feelings?

I felt that way when opening my very last bottle of 1989 Hattenheimer Wisselbrunnen Riesling Spaetlese by Adam Albert. It was a fantastic wine from first release and only got better with age. 1989 was, alas the last vintage for this great estate as poor health forced Heinz Albert to retire.

I also felt that way when I consumed the last of my 1985 Lynch-Bages. The critics said that although very pleasant, the wine didn't have the structure to last and should be drunk up early. Indeed it never closed down--instead it was drinking well at first release and continued to give pleasure well into its second decade.

-Paul W.

My last bottle, drank last year, from a 6-pack purchase of 1990 Vieux Chateau Certan. Not the biggest blockbuster out there, but It was the wine that got my passion rolling on buying and drinking more Bordeaux.

For the longest time I would buy one bottle of everything, maybe sometimes two or three. So yes, I get this feeling all the time! Even now I rarely buy more than six of anything.

[David M. Bueker]

I'm preparing well in advance to regret my last bottle of Truchot. It will have to happen some time.

Aren't you guys familiar with Last Bottle Theory?

Last Bottle Theory
The last bottle of an unobtainable wine is always the best bottle.

Look on the positive side. It is better to regret opening the last bottle than to curse because the wine is shot and you have several bottles remaining.

[James Roscoe]

I absolutely understand the feeling. I wonder if I should admit this here, but in the end, it's only a bottle of wine. I guess the memories are half the fun for me.

While in New York a couple of years ago i brought and opened what I thought to be my last bottle of 83 Chave Hermitage which turned out to be fantastic even to the NY wine geeks at SF Joe's place for dinner. Last month while straightening out in my wine cellar I found another bottle of the 83 Chave that I didn't know I had. I hate to think of drinking this bottle and finding that it doesn't come close in quality to the one in NY which would be a bummer. But as somebody said it's just wine.

yeah.....2002 Clos Rougeard ....Haunting and fragile......every bottle was like that.

The past Christmas dinner and for my son's 21st birthday, I opened the last of a case of 1989 Leoville Barton, not only and wonderful wine that was at it's peak, but my very first futures purchase. I think I can recall what happened to each of those 12 bottles over the years, the second to last was opened on a 100 foot Hatteras Yacht in the middle of Baltimore's Inner Harbor on July 4th...I could go on and on.

Like Rahsaan, it has been my practice to order wine mostly in one, two or three bottle quantities--rarely a half case--so I have last-bottle blues all the time. The 2002 Digioia-Royer Chambolle Musigny was one such regret--I think I had purchased about three bottles of this. It was a village wine that drank like an excellent 1er cru and had beautiful floral fragrances.