Or if not responsibly, at least with proper reverence for the elderly molecules in the bottle.
Over the holidays, we opened a 22-year-old bottle of a California varietal, and by God, it was drinkable!
The summary is, when we cleaned out my parents' old house up in Shiawassee, there were a few bottles of this and that in the basement, including a 1988 Marilyn Merlot. No idea where they got it or why they hadn't consumed it, but we brought it back home and hung on to it, tagging it for opening in 2008. Somehow, that didn't happen, and so we brought it out this year, assuming it would be vinegar. To my astonishment, it was drinkable -- a bit oxidized, perhaps, but drinkable. Hadn't even become noticeably brown.
For more on the topic of opening the legacy wine, see my old article elsewhere.
