Open Your Wine Autumn
Fall is the best season for drinking wine, and typical wine media doesn’t want you to know.
Industry folks have a particular mania for prescribing summertime wines. Every year around late spring there’s an absolute deluge of writing telling you what to drink on your patio and what to drink with your barbecue and by the pool and at the beach and, by the way, did you know rosé can be serious too?
This yearly summer wine PR blitz has always struck me as they-doth-protest too much, due to the anxious reality that in really hot weather, it’s almost always nicer to just have a beer. There’s a sad desperation to the song and dance it takes enjoy wine when it’s fucking roasting outside. Ice buckets and spritz glasses sweating puddles of condensation all over your dinner table, stashing bottles in the freezer because your fridge isn’t cutting it. After all that effort, the wine warms up anyway at the third or fourth sip.
“There’s a sad desperation to the song and dance it takes enjoy wine when it’s fucking roasting outside.”
That’s why I personally get a bit giddy when the sun backs off, making way for that first crisp note of sweater weather. The thrill of being able to open my windows and open any bottle I want, without stressing that it’s too warm, hits me with the perfect breeze. After an oppressive summer, real, proper wine season is finally back! Get out your broadest-shouldered reds and quit pretending the chillable stuff was scratching the same itch. Our long nightmare is over!
Some combination of this liberated atmosphere and the bacchanalian connotations of harvest-time produce in me a vicious urge to tear through the back-catalog of wines I’ve built up throughout the year, in apology to those lovely bottles I neglected in their fridge while I was down at the pub crushing pilsners. Autumn is the season where no bottle is safe. The silly-expensive Barolo I bought myself as a birthday present three years ago, the white Burgundy I spent a day’s pay on because I was already a bit drunk when I walked into the shop, that culty Cab Franc I’d been procrastinating on while devising an appropriate pairing: it’s all fair game. Any bottle whose drinking window I can justify if I squint a bit had better start getting its affairs in order.
Illustration by Lillian Schrag
I’ve come to relish autumn as a deliberate antidote to that problem I face the whole rest of the year where any bottle beyond a certain threshold of expense, rarity, or sentimentality ends up sitting around in my fridge indefinitely because I’m waiting for a special occasion. Who am I fooling? When I actually do get surprised by good news, I buy a fresh bottle of Champagne anyway.
Starting last year, I formalized this annual cellar cleanout into a personal holiday season I call Open Your Wine Autumn. #OYWA if you prefer: somebody come up with a viral TikTok dance. To better understand, appreciate, and participate in OYWA, please consult the following bible:
OYWA is a season-long, blanket Special Occasion for all the bottles you’ve been sitting on.
The OYWA gods will accept any number of offerings, but pious observants work their way through as many bottles as possible by December 21st.
OYWA has some chronological overlap with the extant holidays, but opening something fancy for Thanksgiving is not observing OYWA. Opening something fancy with your reheated Thanksgiving leftovers, however, is OYWA.
Stressing out over the perfect pairing or hosting an elaborate dinner just to open your wine is contrary to the spirit of OYWA. Traditional OYWA meals include comfort food, delivery from your favorite restaurant, or a visit to your favorite BYOB spot. Underthink it.
The principles of OYWA are spontaneity, hedonism, generosity, and living in the moment.
I would encourage any wine lover with one or more mature bottles currently gathering dust to adopt this holiday, not least because a new autumnal wine holiday will let us stop trying to make Beaujolais Nouveau catch on again.
After you’ve broken through your cellar perfectionism and offered a few bottles to the OYWA gods, you too might discover that quiet, life-affirming thrill to silence, for once, the neurotic voice that always tells you that the bottle is ‘too nice’ for tonight, for no other reason than a vague sense of economy or obligation. To finally breaking the chain of declaring, for dozens or hundreds of consecutive nights, that this day of your life is “not special enough” for pleasure.
Should you get hit by the proverbial bus, your heirs could turn out to be the kinds of reprobates who post blurry photos of your collection on r/wine captioned “How much is this worth?”
Best to live a little and enjoy yourself while you still can. Open your wine!
“To finally break the chain of declaring, for dozens or hundreds of consecutive nights, that this day of your life is ‘not special enough’ for pleasure.”
2025 offerings to the OYWA gods
