We had once thought we might join in the sentimental festivities of Open That Bottle Night, as recommended and advocated by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, the Wall Street Journal wine columnists. It seems like a sweet idea: Uncork a wine that you’ve been saving, one that has a special memory or association for you and however many loved ones you want to include—a special bottle that you’ve put off drinking. Then we thought about it, Aldo and I, and instead we have come up with our own night to be celebrated Feb. 23, which happens to be when John and Dottie indulge in OTBN, an acronym that makes me think of off-track betting. Or we may celebrate it Feb. 24, the same night as the Oscars. Or Feb. 22. We aren’t sentimental about the date. It’s not really material. Not when you’re launching OTCWN:

Open That Can of Worms Night.

How this came to be is that—well, the fact of the matter is that by the time Aldo and I have finished the second half of any bottle, good or bad, we tend to find ourselves in the stark, dark minutes of what Aldo refers to as the Albee Hour. “Albee,” of course, is Edward, the playwright who has such a special talent for mining the cruelty latent in the phrase in vino veritas. I mean, if you hold in your hand a lily—in other words, if you begin the evening in a good, light state of mind—a nice bottle of wine will gild the mood. But if your mental state is more like a dry, irritated weed, a bottle of wine will make it sprout like crabgrass at the height of summer. Your sour mood will deepen with an almost invigorating perversity.

If you recognize this feeling, then you are ready to celebrate Open That Can of Worms Night.

And Aldo and I are always primed! Exhausting the dinner and the wine and not at all calmed by the soft, sudsy slursh of the water in dishwasher, we will embark upon an athletic ping-pong of barbed comments, mostly of the petty accusatory sort.

“This wine isn’t sufficiently chilled.”

“Well, it’s sufficiently uncorked, isn’t it? So what are you complaining about?”

“What does that mean?”

“You know what that means –”

And we’re off! Hence the can of worms or, depending on how vigorously you partake of OTCWN, the Pandora’s box, the closet full of skeletons, the rats in the attic, the mice in the cupboard, the rattle in the carborator, the fly trying to worm its way out of the ointment.

It’s really a simpler concept than John and Dottie’s, which means in a sense that it is also more elegant, more flexible, more distilled. Because, as I mentioned, you can commence with any bottle of wine with any meal on any night and any occasion. But if you aren’t sure you have it in you to really enjoy Open That Can of Worms Night, do this: Choose an evening that follows an unusually bilious day at the office. Uncork a wine you don’t even like (or that was given to you as a gift by someone you despise) and serve with an overcooked piece of meat, an insufficiently filleted salmon, or an undistinguished dollop of goatcheese. It may be as soon as a few sips that you will sense internally the thin, firm pressure of an opener slicing into an aluminum can and that small fizzy outrush of air.

“Remember that dinner in Verona for your birthday—?”

“You’re asking me to remember three things in one sentence—dinner, Verona and birthday. What am I, a goddamn encyclopedia?!”

If you’re truly in the Albee Hour, you may want to have a second bottle and a third and have some guests over and humiliate them and then fight over your child who doesn’t really exist. That, of course, is beyond Open That Can of Worms Night. That’s closer to Open That Vein Night.

Better, though, not to get carried away, dear reader. Never go to bed angry. This is all mere sport, an exercise in venting. “Put a cork in it,” as they say, then put your head to the pillow… and dream of your next Open That Can of Worms Night. It can be in 2009. Or tomorrow.

The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago ran an interesting profile of a man it called “the wine antisnob.” His name is Tim Hanni, and his story is certainly fascinating: A leading wine expert, he has been a recovering alcoholic for more than a decade.

For my purposes, though, the more significant point is not his story but his attitude, this so-called wine antisnobbery.

Let me begin by making the point that I welcome wine antisnobs–I came close just now to saying I love wine antisnobs—because without antisnobbery how can one properly define snobbery? It is something like the old philosopher’s paradox that by denying God you admit that He exists. I believe Tolstoy also said something to the effect that without death we would not be able to define the meaning of life, but I’m not sure I trust Tolstoy on that one. By the end of his life he was a big-bearded scold.

I want to deal with just one aspect of this wine antisnob’s active career. In addition to launching a consulting company, WineQuest, the name of which has a certain Holy Grail aspirationality to it, Hanni has resolved the knottier issues of wine and food pairing with a practical—one might also say radically practical—form of kitchen chemistry: fundamentally this relies on the addition of balancing or neutralizing agents like salt, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese. He even has developed a condiment, Vignon, that is meant to accomplish this with a few shakes of the bottle.

This approach, I have to say, is not one I embrace with any enthusiasm, that I regard coldly. Because my own simple, ringingly concrete solution to a food that does not go with a certain wine is to a) change the food or b) change the wine. But for heaven’s sake don’t herniate a disc trying to bridge the gap. Why bother with détente or glasnost or whatever? Have a glass of water between your bites of food and your sips of wine. Or stick to water altogether while eating the wine-challenging food. That, the Journal notes, is the traditionalist approach, which might also be denoted the Vivosian approach, except that the Journal did not contact me for the article. Instead we have the approach that could be called Hannian. The article notes that you can drink a light wine with steak—did I hear “yuck,” anyone?— by squeezing lemon juice on the steak , salting it, or drizzling it with Bernaise. Well, what if you shouldn’t consume salt or Bernaise? What if your blood pressure and cholesterol level are already elevated up to the height of a scary high ridge and someday your heart might go plummeting over the edge?

Or what if you plain don’t like lemon on your steak? Have you ever offered a cow a lemon? They don’t like lemons, either: You are adding insult to injury squeezing lemon juice into its cooked remains.

Why not go with a heartier, deeper red—the wine that does the job and has done so for centuries?

Now, a little chemistry is not a bad thing at all, not at all—Aldo with great pride can recite something called Avogardro’s number that he learned when he was off in his Austrian boarding school and his father was running around the Continent selling rich ladies fraudulent vitamins derived from monkey parts. He especially likes to reel the number off with company present . No one hears him anyway. He sits there smiling to himself and moving his lips and counting infinite digits on his pudgy ringed hands.

It was Aldo who suggested we test at least one suggestion of Mr. Hanni’s, as reported in the Journal: Asparagus is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to pair with white wine (the artichoke is possibly even worse). It regards wine the way a porcupine does a cat: Gets its spiky back up. With wine, aspargus tastes metallic and, as Aldo once put it, like a marsh grass that has wandered into a French kitchen. And the wine reciprocates, spitefully, by losing its deliciousness. Mr. Hanni’s solution: Lemon juice and salt.

This sounded plausible to me. And, besides, lemon juice gives a wonderful lightening touch to asparaus. Aldo and I poured ourselves a 2006 Inama Soave Classico for this experiment. With plain steamed asparagus, true enough, food and wine were unpleasant – that familiar awfulness blossomed that makes me think of the aroma and taste of water from an old drinking fountain. But Mr. Hanni’s trick worked fairly well: With lemon juice and a little salt, the asparagus maintained its asparagusy flavor in the mouth, as did the wine its light floral and citrus notes. The clash was resolved.

In the end, however, this experiment did not produce actual harmony of wine and vegetable, which means that aesthetically it was a wash. This was not yin and yang – the flavors were not integrated. They merely shook hands across a fence running down the middle of my tongue. They might be called neighborly.

And since I am a wine snob, what is the good of that?

The holidays are approaching, are here in fact, and yet Aldo and I have chosen to spend the night indoors as if there were a howling blizzard outside, and seasonal carolers could only make themselves heard to the rescue dogs by singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from deep inside the drifts in which they are buried. Aldo is already in his robe and reading the letters of Noel Coward, which he finds absorbing, except that he gets tired of them from time to time and will watch a cartoon on YouTube. I take this opportunity to record for the sake of my eager public a few notes on a wine we had recently, Michel Tete’s Domaine du Clos du Fief:

Medium intense ruby core fading to a pink watery rim, which makes me think of a flamingo melting. Medium aromas of cinnamon, tart cherries, musk and soil. I suppose one might ask soil from where? Julienas, France, presumably. On the palate: Dry. High acidity. Medium bodied, which Aldo used to be when he was more religious about aerobic exercise. Medium also as to the alcohol and the tannins. Flavors of cherries, both tart and dried, nutmeg, peat and leather. I remember in particular that Aldo insisted he tasted peat and leather – peat on leather. “There is a difference,” he said. “Some princesses are more discerning about peas than others.” At the finish there comes a little light berry twist.

The wine is balanced. Lean without much concentration or intensity, which I suppose is how I would describe Aldo back in the days when he did exercise religiously. It might be summed up as a slightly more refined and serious beaujolais.

I have a small note here saying that Aldo also described it as “faintly grim,” and I should have asked him in greater detail just what he meant by that. Who drinks a faintly grim wine other than a Puritan or Oliver Cromwell on a feast day? But he’s watching a cartoon at the moment, and I don’t want to distract him until he goes back to his reading.

We were sharing a bottle of the 2004 Domaine Rimbert “Le Mas au Schist” over a nice, simple late-autumn supper of sausages, apples and rice. We had indulged in our usual exercise of wine anaylsis, starting with an observation of the deep purple core, then taking in the dark fruit and dusky perfume on the nose. Yet I noticed that Aldo seemed to be holding back.

I don’t mean just reticent. I mean I thought he was holding back tears.

I asked him what on earth could be troubling him when we were embarked on this tasty St. Chinian wine, and he said – after a certain amount of hemming and hawing that made my compassionate mood rather thinner than it started out to be – that he had been reading online about a famous experiment conducted with a group of wine experts:

They had been given glasses of wine, some red, some white, and asked to describe and identify them. Well, the trick was that the wines were all the same white: some had merely been reddened with vegetable dye. And yet the experts went on to describe the doctored white in classic, even hackneyed terms of red.

To me, this was not news: There have been plenty of tests in which blindfolded experts couldn’t distinguish between a white and a red. But to Aldo, this all raised terrible doubt: He seemed as sad as a child uncertain about Santa, or a saint in a dark night of the soul over the really big questions of God and heaven and so on. I have never had a dark night of the soul, fortunately. My sleep is too important to me, and usually the wine with dinner seals the deal.

I think I would say Aldo’s case was touching, in its display of vulnerability, but also annoying, in that he was entertaining doubts about me.

I know this because he said so. He didn’t say, “How do I know, Billy, that you are as genuinely expert as I have always believed? How am I to firm up my old trust in your abilities, which have, sometimes certainly, verged on genius?” He may have been thinking that, I suppose. But what he said was: “Wouldn’t it be fun, Billy, if I did that with you?”

“Did what?”

“Blindfolded you, say, and had you determine what you were drinking. It would be wine, of course. I wouldn’t try and trick you with soda or grape juice. But it would be fun.”

“What’s fun about that?”

“To see you proved right.”

“If I am going to be proved right, why waste the time? I can see perfectly well what this is about, testing your shakey faith.”

“Don’t be silly, Billy. I was baptized and confirmed and have a real shot at a Knight of Malta garter and certificate, if I write a big enough check.”

“I mean faith in me. I am not going to indulge in some sort of game, Aldo, just because you’re afraid I’m fallible. If anything, I would think you wanted to shield me from anything that might – I don’t want to say expose me, because that implies I have something to hide. And I do not.”

“Well, I do wonder now how much anyone can know. I would try this on Robert Parker, but I’d have to buy a gun and break through his damned security. Doesn’t he live in a mansion compound surrounded by a moat with piranhas and an electric fence with armed guards in turrets?”

“Yes, and why shouldn’t he? The Bordeaux assassins speak fluent English and can bluff their way past anyone. And what would it matter? Does it really matter if a person, tricked into a false position, falls back on preconceptions and memories?”

“I believe it might. Might matter.”

I determined that in future I would not let Aldo open a bottle of wine out of my sight: He knows how to make the sound of a cork popping by plucking his cheek with his finger. Who knows what he might pour me?

This was an awful blow, and I knew we would eventually overcome it, but for now Aldo’s mistrust in me had created just as much if not more mistrust in him. We continued to drink our wine, and eventually enjoyed it, and got a soft buzz from it. But the evening no longer was what it might have been.

In bed, I prayed for the safety of Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and Kermit Lynch, then lay awake for a spell, my head percolating with anxiety. Was this a dark night of the soul? Then I fell asleep, and slept in till ten a.m.

When Aldo asks me what it means to call a wine “haunting,” I assume this is another instance of his endearing childish literalness – this is Halloween season, after all. And so my first instinct is to provide the most childishly literal explanation possible. I tell him of the legendary bottle of Clos d’Escalier that for generations has struck terror in the hearts of the Escalier family of Provence.

It is their vineyard that produces the wine, and it is their family that suffers by it. The story goes that whenever a bottle of the long-depleted 1787 vintage appears unbidden in the dumbwaiter connecting the dining salon to the cellar, someone at dinner that evening will be dead by sunrise, as surely as Poe’s raven croaks, “Never again,” or “Oh no! Nurse!” or whatever. It all has something to do with a curse brought down on the Escaliers by a Madame Defarge-like crone at the time of the French Revolution. I believe the family refused her a 10 percent discount on a case.

This, at any rate, is a wine that could be called “haunting” with absolute accuracy.

“Thank you for that ghost tale,” says Aldo with a noticeable lack of blood-running-cold fear, “but I was referring to this wine review I was reading. The writer refers to a riesling spatlese as possessing, and I quote, a haunting beauty. I’m trying to think what that would be — a wine that haunts, let alone a wine that haunts beautifully.”

“Ah!

“What?”

“You’ve hit on a favorite topic of mine, the overreaching wine writer. I take it you never have had a quote-unquote haunting wine?”

“No.”

“And that would be correct, because the fact of the matter is that wine is not haunting, does not haunt. The only person it haunts is a wine writer overreaching for effect. I think we can agree that a wine might be memorable?”

“Yes.”

“Or even unforgettable?”

“Possibly.”

“But to say something haunts — that usually is underlined by a thin frisson of something disturbing, or negative. Much the way an image of a skull might haunt a person as a memento mori.”

“You mean a reminder of death.”

“Well, certainly not a reminder of lunch, Aldo.”

“Cheap sarcasm wounds deeply, Mr. Vivos. You know that.”

“Sorry. At any rate, a man could be haunted by the memory of slapping his mistress -”

“Now that’s an odd example -”

“Or by the memory, say, of killing her by conking her on the head with a bottle of wine and then disposing of the body before his wife finds out —”

“What is this, Desperate Housewives?”

“What I’m getting at is that wine writing tends to be imprecise to begin with. And when left in the hands of a writerly soul who may already be poetic and is made even more so by the ingestion of half a bottle – the phrasing melts into gush and then slush. I have had thousands of wines in my adult life, and I have not been haunted by any of them. Just like you. And neither us is any the poorer for it. We don’t need to be haunted by a wine, or thrown into the ecstasies of St. Teresa of Avila.”

“All we need is the corkscrew –.”

“That’s correct, Aldo.”

“– Which releases the spirits in the bottle. I wonder if that means a writer could describe a bottle in terms of Linda Blair.”

“Head-turning.”

“Levitating.”

Then Aldo does his impression of Linda Blair swearing at Ellen Burstyn, and the conversation ends.