The goal is eventually to have dinner together twice a year, but we need to build our cellar in order to do that, so we meet once a year for now. Buying newly released wine for the cellar is the easy part. 1996 Michel Lafarge Beaune 1er Cru Grèves , $60. We've only just begun and I'm breaking rules already. Premoxed! Corked! MORE >>

The winery is located just down the road from Ornellaia, purchased finally in 1996. "My great-grandmother was famous for being a harsh negotiator," Gaia Gaja tells me, telling a cute story about her great-grandmother and her marketplace shopping habits, which explains the name of the winery which means "endless negotiations" in Italian. MORE >>

usually serve orange wines at cellar temp (55 degrees F) and let the bottle warm up on the table from there. Orange wines are sweeping the nation! Well, something like that. These white wines emerge from their fermentation on the grape skins with a rich, sometimes orange, hue. Do they tell diners to call in advance? Do they use aerators? MORE >>

John Gilman, author of the newsletter The View from the Cellar , joins us again for a Q&A. But being younger than the gentleman I just mentioned, I do not have the same reserves of old vintages of white Burgundy or white Bordeaux in my cellar, and so premox has really hit my collection hard. Are these wines forcibly better? MORE >>

1996 Crawford River Riesling, Henty. 1996 Clarendon Hills Astralis Vineyard Shiraz (Syrah), McLaren Vale. 1996 Penfolds Block 42 Kalimna Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Barossa Valley. 1996 Best’s Wines Thomson Family Great Western Shiraz, Great Western, Grampians. 1996 Yalumba The Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon/Shiraz, Barossa. MORE >>