Every January the Union des Grands Crus, an association of many but not all the best wines from Bordeaux, comes to American to present the wines of a given vintage (in this case 2022) across several major cities in the United States. The date is always shortly after the wines have been bottled. They are never mere samples from the barrels. The transition from barrel to bottle is of the utmost significance: One can say that the wines have really begun their transition from protected infancy to the various stages of potential development which can only take place when the fermented juice is “imprisoned” in small to medium sized glass bottles. The juice has been swimming in a relatively large wood barrel (typically holding a potential 300 bottles) for two years in cellars close to the vineyards. The bottled wines now leave the peace and protection of cellar life to enter the big world where they will find new cellars often thousands of miles from their source. The fate of the bottled wines is determined by factors wholly extraneous to the bottled wines themselves: The effects of travel, the storage conditions under which the bottles will now age, decisions about when to open the bottles, the possibility (very real these days) that the wines may be sold at auction and start bottled life all over in a new location.