Many people have them; those old bottles of red wine, inherited or received as a gift. You have only one or two, and with each passing year, the reluctance to open them increases, since they seem irreplaceable. Even if you could buy the same wine, it wouldn't be the same bottle that Mom or Auntie or your mentor gave you. But at the same time, there's the worry that it's going off, getting past its peak, turning to vinegar. Eventually, the two curves cross and you select an evening and a set of company. You've made the decision to drink the old wine. What now?

We were recently honored with an invitation to help a colleague drink a bottle of 1964 Durfort-Vivens, inherited from her parents. There was a certain amount of trepidation, for all the reasons mentioned above, but pointless -- the wine was sound, dry, perfectly brick-colored at the edge of the glass, redolent of its 40 years in the bottle and a testament to the Chateau's expertise, even in that rainy harvest year. Durfort isn't mentioned along with Latour and Montrose as having managed to pick before the rain began, but I suspect they did in fact manage it. At any rate, we spent a pleasant afternoon, and the only thing marring the event was just that it was over so quickly. On the way home, I began to ask myself how we'd do it differently and what advice I'd give someone else with a dusty old Bordeaux to open.

First, do your homework

First of all, I'd suggest some simple research. Find out what you can about the wine. In the case of the Durfort, it wasn't hard -- Durfort is, after all, a well-regarded second cru producer, and the Margaux is the Chateau's first wine. The year 1964, as I noted, saw rain during the harvest, spoiling some left-bank wines but providing a few outstanding exceptions. All of this can be found in a few basic books and one or two web searches. Look up your producer and read the geographic context as well (Durfort, for example, is in Margaux which is in the Medoc which is part of the Bordeaux ... you get the idea.)

Then, of course, if the producer is still in business, see what their website has to say. With a wine of 30 or 40 years, of course, much will have changed -- or maybe not. I can imagine a northern Italian red, for example, being made by the same general set of people today as it was in 1964. Even if not, there may be pictures of the vineyards, the Chateau, the current personnel. Maps are always nice to have, and more to the point, there may be contact information for the company. Try sending them mail, saying politely that you're about to open an old bottle of theirs and asking if they have any suggestions regarding what you'll find.

Another interesting thing to know: is the wine still available? Again, the web is a quick, painless way to find out. In about 30 seconds, I was able to determine that while Margaux from 1964 is scarce, there is still some out there -- actually, the same bottle we drank is for sale if you're in a state with a reciprocal shipping agreement with California.

Finally, refresh your memory on the wine itself, meaning in this case top Medoc reds. This isn't, after all, the wine you drink everyday, and its theoretical characteristics aren't necessarily burned into your brain. Remind yourself of its constituent grapes and the general aroma and palette attributes that the experts claim for it. You'll need to allow for the passage of time, obviously; today's wine from a given region or even a given appellation may not be the same thing at all as your venerable example. And you might consider having a similar but much younger bottle on hand as well, either for comparison or in the dread event that the old wine is undrinkable, as a stand in and consolation prize.

Next, gear up

Now that you're armed with knowledge, let's turn quickly and briefly to the question of equipment. We can be brief because there isn't actually all that much to it -- at least not any more so than there is to your everyday drinking gear.

EVIL INCARNATE
The so-called augur screw on these dormitory-style bottle openers will crumble corks of more than very recent vintage. Make a clean break with your youth and throw yours away today.

First, you need a proper tool for opening the bottle, and there is only one such tool. Put that expensive "rabbit" thing on your knick-knack shelf where it belongs, before you break it. If you have one of those two-arm openers with an augur instead of a worm, throw it away -- put it in the trash before you destroy another cork. Instead, drop by the party store and buy a waiter's friend with a worm screw. Practice a bit on lesser bottles and you'll never look back.

THE PATH OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
This is the true "waiter's friend" corkscrew and foil knife. Its sole drawback is that you can't take it on a plane with you; otherwise, it's the right tool for the job, period.

So you have a professional corkscrew and you know how to use it; have you got something to decant the wine into? Why would you decant it? Let's review the two reasons (and there really are just two) why you decant any wine. 1) to give a young wine a chance to interact with the air and simulate some of the aroma and flavor attributes that long aging (or better winemaking technique) would have given it; and 2) to separate an old wine from its sediment. Since this is clearly a case of an old wine, probably with some sediment, you really do need to decant.

However, that doesn't mean that you need an expensive crystal decanter. Any large glass container will do; for these purposes, you don't even care about how much surface it exposes, since you're not interested in more exposure to the air -- all you want is something clear (pouring wine into colored glass is slightly déclassé), with a handle or a narrow enough neck for a firm grip. A water pitcher will do.

Ah, and of course you have to drink the wine out of something. Will you be doing your special bottle a disservice if you don't have the exactly correct, high-end, big bucks wine glass? In short, no. What you do need are enough identical generic "red wine" glasses to go around. They should be one of the typical designs, tapering in at the top to concentrate aromas and bouquet, and above all, they need to be clean and free of soap, fingerprints, dried lemonade, and anything else. Rinse them with hot water, dry and polish them with a lint-free towel, and relax.

Opening and Decanting

First of all, set the bottle upright and let it stand for at least 12 hours before you plan to open it. There is no magical or biochemical reason for this; it's purely practical. The sediment has been collecting on the side, and it needs a chance to settle to the bottom. Do this in a place where the wine will reach (or maintain) the serving temperature you think best.

When it comes time to open the old fellow, try to provide a bit of theater. Stand while you do it; for one thing, it looks a bit more professional and for another, you get better leverage as you pull the cork. And throughout the process, avoid agitating it -- you want that sediment to stay right where it is, on the bottom of the bottle.

Leaving the worm and lever closed, open the foil knife and run it around the neck of the bottle, pressing on the opposite side with your thumb, just below the lip. The object is to remove a small cap of foil, completely exposing the pouring surface. To put it another way, you don't want wine to touch foil as it leaves the bottle. Once you've run the blade around the neck twice or so, you should be able to lift off the foil with the edge of the blade.

The top of the cork and the lip of the bottle may well be a frightening sight. Don't be concerned -- there's very little correspondence between how things look at this point and the actual state of the wine. Close the foil knife, open the worm and lever, and compose yourself. There really is only one bad thing that can happen at this point; anything else that's truly wrong with the wine is a result of circumstances many years in the past. All you're concerned with now is that the cork come out whole.

Tipping the worm at about a 45 degree angle to the top of the bottle, insert the first eighth-inch or so of the point directly into the middle of the cork. This is like drilling a pilot hole for a screw -- it helps keep the worm centered. Next, tip the worm back upright, and gently screw it the rest of the way down into the cork, holding the bottle still and turning the corkscrew. (You are remembering not to shake the bottle around, right?) Get down to the last one or two turns.

Now, brace the step of the lever against the bottle lip, hold the bottle by the neck in one hand and the corkscrew handle in the other, thumb toward you. Bring your corkscrew hand up and away from you, placing leverage on the cork. Feel for the first movement of the cork, and watch closely for signs that it's crumbling. When it moves that first fraction of an inch up out of the neck, you're home free. Relax for a second, swing the handle up as far as it will go, and watch the cork rise smoothly up out of the bottle. At this point, you've bent the corkscrew handle almost up to the vertical; change your grip to wrap your hand completely around corkscrew, cork, and all, and gently twist the cork the remaining way out of the bottle. Steady yourself such that when it comes free, you don't jerk the bottle up and down. Breathe deeply.

At this point, you could try a preliminary sniff at the bottle, looking for signs of spoilage. But it's probably better to get the wine out and into the decanter first, and let assessment wait another few minutes.

Wipe the lip of the bottle clean of dirt, oxidized foil, rotted cork, and the other unidentifiable dross that materializes over the years. The same principle applies here as it does with foil: you don't want the wine to touch the crud while you're pouring.

Hold the decanter in one hand and the bottle in the other, in front of a good light source. Slowly pour the wine into the decanter, watching the shoulder of the bottle against the light. That's where the sediment will collect as the wine flows above it, up the neck and out into the world. Regulate your pouring such that any solids you can see stay in that low point and don't join the wine as it goes by. When there is no more sediment-free wine to pour, you're done. Set the decanter down, set the bottle down, sit down yourself. The bon moment is upon you.

But wait a minute!

Shouldn't you let the wine sit in the decanter for a while? Well, no, not in this case. You do that with young wines, as we said above, to let contact with the air carry out some chemical transformations that will simulate aging -- that will make the wine seem less tannic, for example. But your wine doesn't need to simulate great age and in fact, it may suffer from sitting out. Just get down to the serious business at hand: finding out what's been going on in that bottle all these years.

What could go wrong?

Barring a few purely stochastic events -- the cat could jump onto the table and knock the decanter over, or a small child could bite someone's ankle, causing a lamentable loss of focus and even gravitas, Lord help us -- there are essentially two things now that could go wrong. Assuming that you've locked the cat and the children in the basement for the time being, you're really only concerned with finding signs of oxidation and contamination.

Oxidation in wine takes place when the wine is exposed to oxygen. (Surprising, isn't it? Who would have thought?) During a wine's normal lifespan, oxidation occurs slowly and is to some extent a good thing. Corks allow very small amounts of oxygen through, permitting changes in the wine that help define and mature it. (This is why corks are used and why screw caps and plastic closures shouldn't be.) But when corks dry out and let more oxygen through, oxidation speeds up, potentially spoiling the wine. And a very old wine, too long in the bottle for the amount of oxidative constituents it contains, can oxidize even if its cork is intact.

Oxidation affects different kinds of wine differently. Dry red wine that is oxidized will sometimes smell burned or like stale butter -- these are the odors of aldehydes formed by oxidation. The taste may be sour or flat. It will be distinctly different, anyway, from your expectations for a Claret or a Burgundy. In any sort of extreme, oxidation of a dry red is a serious flaw.

Contamination: while you could think of oxidation as a form of contamination, it's a very specialized form, since some oxygen is supposed to "contaminate" the wine. Other substances, though, should not be present at all. The 900 pound gorilla of contamination is trichloroanisole, TCA, the culprit behind "corked" wine. You'll hear many off-hand explanations for what corking is and where it comes from -- "bacteria," "rotted corks," "some kind of fungus." Here's the most definitive answer I've found:

"2.4.6-Trichloroanisole is an off-flavor substance which is believed to be produced by fungal degradation and methylation of pentachlorophenol fungicides. Its origin in wine can be traced back to contaminated cork stoppers and (sic) is either already present in the corkwood or produced during corkwood-processing." Andreas Hoffman, Wolf Rüdiger Sponholz, et al, Gerstel Global Application Notes

So TCA is created by fungus, interacting with something applied to the cork to kill fungus. Leaving aside the irony there, you can detect presence of TCA by a smell of wet cardboard or mould. There can be very high levels or very subtle, trace amounts. All but the most sensitive of us have consumed slightly corked wine without recognizing it, but in any large quantity, TCA announces itself unmistakably.

What do you do about it?

This is the tricky part. If there's something obviously wrong with the wine, what then? For me, it depends on roles. If it's your wine, it's up to you to make the definite determination. Good manners require that the invited guest follow the host's lead, after all. And if the host chokes on the first swallow, it's acceptable to murmur low key endorsements -- "hmmm, yes, it does seem a bit flat, I'm afraid ..." but keep it low key. With legacy wine, there may be much, much more emotion involved than a few parts per million of TCA should be allowed to disrupt. Follow the host's lead.

If you are the host, though, you owe it to your guests to be honest about a truly undrinkable bottle. Give it your best restaurant-grade assessment, looking at the color, smelling, tasting. And if it's really off, say so, set it aside, conceal your disappointment, and open that backup bottle I mentioned above.

And if it's good ...?

Will a 40 year old Bordeaux or a 1978 Barolo change your life? Probably not. Will it even be noticeably better than a younger wine of equal quality? Perhaps not. And the experience itself will be short; the sensations will evaporate quickly. A few minutes spent in drinking and evaluating and decades of subtlety will be gone. But how is that different from spending an hour with, say, the actual paintings of Charles Demuth, after years of seeing them reproduced, written about, and discussed? You can't live at the museum, you can't spend your life in a gallery. But you can prepare, you can gain a bit of background, you can absorb the reactions of others, and then enjoy your short time with the works of an artist, going away with impressions and reactions of your own.

This seems to me to be a good way to approach drinking a rare, elderly wine. Make the most of the moment, spare a thought to the person or persons who gave you or left you the bottle, take a brief note or two about how it smelled and tasted and looked, and finally, reflect on the people who made it, tens of years ago and perhaps continents away. It's their art and their care and their craft and in many senses their wine you're drinking.