There are a lot of bottles in my man cave.

That may be understating it a bit.

I have two bookcases with shelves loaded six bottles across and three deep, with more bottles sitting on top. Then there’s a heavy-duty plastic shelving unit in the closet with probably seven or eight bottles across and four deep.

At some point, a bourbon collection stops being a display and starts becoming storage.

The problem with storage is that things disappear.

The other night, I was digging around for bottles to use in a blind tasting when I came across a bottle of Uncharted. I had almost completely forgotten it was there.

I picked it up during a trip to see Lizzi in Woodstock. Uncharted uses a river-aging concept that reminds me a little of Jefferson’s Ocean, except instead of sending barrels to sea, the whiskey spends time moving along inland waterways.

Whatever you think of the concept, I remember being pleasantly surprised by the whiskey itself. It was a good pour.

And yet there it sat. Not because I disliked it. Not because I decided I was done with it. Not because there was something wrong with the bottle. I simply couldn’t see it.

That realization made me start looking at the rest of the collection a little differently.

There are a lot of bottles I rarely drink, and not always for the same reason. Some have become hidden behind other bottles. Some are perfectly good but don’t evoke any particular memory or emotion that causes me to reach for them before something else. Some were interesting once, but my tastes have changed.

And some I deliberately leave alone.

This weekend, I have a bottle of Dancing Panda with me. I bought it for a very specific reason: I wanted to drink it on Sully’s birthday. His birthday party is today.

I’ve had opportunities to open the bottle before now. I could have poured it on any number of nights. But every time I saw it, I passed it by. That wasn’t neglect. That was intention. There is a difference.

Ecclesiastes tells us, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

We usually think about that verse in terms of major seasons of life—birth and death, mourning and dancing, beginnings and endings. But I wonder if it also applies to some of the smaller things we keep reaching past.

Sometimes we neglect good things simply because they have been pushed out of sight.

Prayer can become that way. So can Scripture, gratitude, friendships and things we once loved doing. They get moved behind the urgent things, the loud things, the new things and the things directly in front of us. We don’t decide that they no longer matter. We just stop seeing them.

Then one day we stumble across them again and think, I forgot how much I enjoyed this.

Maybe that is what Uncharted was doing behind the other bottles.

But there is another side to it. Not everything we reach past needs to be brought back into regular rotation.

Some things belonged to another season. Others no longer speak to us the way they once did. And others still are worth leaving untouched until the right moment comes.

That is Dancing Panda. I didn’t forget it. I didn’t lose interest in it.

I was waiting. Because sometimes the meaning of the pour matters more than the whiskey in the glass. Today, when I pour it for Sully’s birthday, it won’t just be another bottle I finally got around to opening.

It will be his bottle.

And maybe that is the lesson hiding somewhere in all those crowded shelves. The things we reach past are not all the same.

Some deserve to be rediscovered. Others have already served their purpose.

And some are waiting for their season. The challenge is learning to tell the difference.

So maybe the question isn’t simply, What have I been neglecting? Maybe it is this:

What good thing have I allowed to disappear from view—and what am I wisely saving for the right time?

Faithfulness often means reaching back for something we have forgotten. And sometimes it means leaving the bottle right where it is until the day finally comes to pour it.

Enjoyed this? Subscribe and get future reflections, bourbon notes, and assorted nonsense delivered straight to your inbox.

Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt