One decade ago, former Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher established an admirable annual event they called "Open That Bottle Night." They set a date and importuned their readers to put off their excuses and to once and for all open a bottle they'd been saving for a special occasion. Even though they no longer work for the paper, through Twitter and Facebook followings, and on the website openthatbottlenight.com, Gaiter and Brecher kept up the tradition, which was held Feb. 26 this year. Hundreds of "live" accounts of revelatory bottles were sent to them that night.

Gaiter and Brecher's rationale is simple: "What are you waiting for?" goes the reasoning. And they're right. Your 10th anniversary, for example, is probably not the best night to ponder the profundities of a vintage champagne if your spouse is eyeing you suggestively in nothing but underpants. Meanwhile, so many of these "special" bottles age themselves into senescence in some cupboard or cellar corner, going bad long before a decision is made on the perfect moment. So yes, by all means, to hell with ceremony, get out the corkscrew.

And yet why stop at just one? Why not open two bottles and double your pleasure? OK, you may not have two 1982 Pauillacs lying around in your cellar, but what's to keep you from opening two bottles of just about anything else, in the interests of education, not to mention sheer pleasure? To this end I'd like to inaugurate a variation on the theme: Open Those Bottles Night. Gather your friends, break out a few extra glasses and go multiple.

Why do this? For the simple reason that comparing two or more wines together can, in an instant, teach you more general lessons about wine than any solo project. A side-by-side assessment immediately opens avenues of contrast that a single glass cannot. Points of comparison light up your understanding. Sensory skills, given something to brush up against, will sharpen in a comparative exercise. Best of all, you'll probably come face to face with a few unexpected truths about what you like, and what you don't.

Pick a Parameter

To make this useful, and move a few steps up from random, your first step should be to decide what you want to compare and pick a parameter. This is easier said than done: With wine, the options are almost limitless. You can certainly pair chardonnay with pinot gris, for example; better yet, French chardonnay with California chardonnay, and Oregon pinot gris with Italian pinot grigio. You can contrast vintages, like Beaujolais from 2008 and 2009, both excellent years -- what does the extra year in bottle contribute to the 2008, if anything?

You can compare varieties across countries, or regions within countries; and within regions you can get as geeky as a well-heeled sommelier, comparing, say, warm sites and cold sites, left banks and right banks, Napa's mountain vineyards versus those on the valley floor, syrah grown in granitic soils in French and American vineyards, fruit from fogbound vines in Santa Cruz and Piemonte.

You can take a single varietal -- pinot noir, say, which is renowned for its transparency -- and go on an extended world tour, taking away lessons in soil types, climate, tension, minerality, density, intensity, ripeness. I recently tasted a half-dozen pinot noirs with the governing principle that each of them came from vineyards above 1,200 feet to see whether I could parse anything resembling "mountain" character -- it was there in spades, a noticeable structural through-line, whether the wine came from Mendocino, Santa Cruz or Mt. Harlan. To taste these wines solo wouldn't have had nearly the impact, and no pattern could have emerged, the way it did with such striking clarity in this horizontal comparison.

Use your meters

To every comparative tasting, I bring two devices: my Pleasure Meter and my Bullshit Meter. Obviously we drink wine because there's pleasure involved. Stands to reason that doubling up on the bottles doubles the pleasure, at least potentially. But I also have found that the pleasure afforded by one well-made wine is usually quite different from the pleasure another offers; learning the differences between those good vibrations can be tremendously instructive. One wine, for example, may be sensuous to the point of slutty, while in the next glass you may discover an altogether different sort of pleasure, less immediately obvious, revealed only through careful attention and persistence -- which in the end may make it all the more profound. And in the course of discovering this, you may learn that wine's elusive attributes can be every bit as pleasurable as its obvious one.

As for the Bullshit Meter: It comes in handy when wines don't ring true. The market is full of wines that taste good enough but don't seem to come by their flavors authentically. They don't taste like an achievement in the vineyard but reflect an effort in the winery lab, or even the winery conference room: They are concoctions, whose formulaic consistency brings them under a certain amount of suspicion. Formulaic wines aren't necessarily the end of the world, but it's good to know how to pick them out, what their markers are, a thing that's easier to do when you've got the real thing in the next glass: Wines that haven't been corrected in the winery tend to "out" wines that have.

Be open minded

The best thing about comparative tastings is that in nearly every case you come away knowing something about your palate you didn’t know. You come face to face with your prejudices, for one thing: Assumptions that, say, all rieslings are sweet are inevitably dashed by a single sip of one from the Clare Valley (Australia), whose signal austerity may in turn serve to reveal that the German Rieslings you thought were all so sweet and cloying are in fact some of the nerviest, most thrilling on earth.

More to the point, good wines change in the glass, as will your comparisons. The wine that appears sullen and inexpressive in the first half hour may become the most beautiful after an hour of air. In a solo tasting that may not be evident at first, or you may blow through the wine before it has had a chance to really go through its paces -- of course, with more bottles open, and with comparison on your mind, the whole process becomes slower, and presumably more contemplative -- and you just might have some left over to revisit the following evening -- Open Those Bottles Nights, anyone?

Patrick Comiskey is a senior contributor for Wine & Spirits Magazine, where he serves as chief critic for non-California domestic wines and contributes articles on the wines of California, Oregon and Washington.

Photo: Glasses of wine. Credit: Patrick Comiskey

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