Noah,
Perhaps you don’t want to open them at all. After all, if you fall in love with them, you may want to keep buying and buying and buying them.
Then what? 
I’ve never liked sloshfests (not saying that’s one of the options talked about here).
But now that I follow medical advice for alcohol consumption, I prefer no more than two different wines at a meal.
No judgement in others, I used to think a bottle a person is reasonable (and was at that time in my life). Now it’s half that.
Add to that the enjoyment I get in following the wines evolution in the glass, and it’s an easy answer for me
Just open them whenever. Saving things for a big event may result in no event being big enough for you. Taking them to a big dinner where a lot of other people are bringing wine may result in getting lost. There’s no right way or wrong way. The other day I had a really good burrito so we opened a fairly expensive wine. Why? Because we wanted it. No special day, no special event, just the wife and me and we quite liked the wine. A few days earlier I knew I was going to see a friend so I brought a nice bottle. She also happened to have had a couple of bottles with her, so we just shared them with people who happened to be at the bar. And I’ve opened nice bottles when I’m alone and have nobody to share with. Why punish myself and force myself to drink crap, or worse yet, nothing at all?
So don’t over-think it.
I read a click bait article recently about gift wrapping. People tended to prefer poorly-wrapped gifts from friends rather than really neatly wrapped. Why? Because the neat wrapping apparently sets up an expectation and if you just end up with a coffee mug, you’re not all that excited. So it’s like dinner - don’t over-wrap it. Just open a bottle when the mood strikes and you feel like a nice bottle. After all, we don’t just drink wine so we can post about it, right?
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If I only have one or two bottles of something that I think is going to change in interesting ways over the course of the night, for example a grand cru burgundy from a really great producer, I will generally open it over dinner with my wife so we can see what happens and judge and appreciate it over a long period. But one of the cool things about wine collecting is that if you do it long enough, you tend to assemble a pretty good haul of wines you really, really love at prices that, in retrospect, look like bargains. For that stuff, I open it pretty freely.
A
Rather than saving your best bottles (whatever that means for each person) for a special event, I like to create a special event by opening my best bottles. Sometimes it’s with pizza on a Tuesday night after a rough day but I am reminded of how much I love my wife and kids and we have a great conversation around the dinner table that carries over to the living room. Sometimes it’s a dinner at a favorite restaurant. Sometimes it is sharing a “100-point wine” with somebody who is vaguely aware of scores because of shelf-talkers and it’s a chance to show them that they may or may not like something with points from a particular critic.
That said, I do understand the dilemma of having a single of something “precious” (however you define that). My solution is to buy more other wines and wait for a moment when you know it’s right for the precious ones.
I’ve been looking for occasions to open the special bottles. I wrote one up recently. I was invited to a restaurant dinner by a customer who was grateful for a tasting I put on a month or two before. There were 7 of us. We had 6 bottles. I told him I was bringing one legendary bottle. That was the sum of the discussion. I brought 1982 Mouton (tied for the second best wine of the night). He brought 1970 Mouton (4th best wine of the night). A 99 point white Hermitage was tied with the Mouton. A 1970 Lopez Heredia ‘Tondonia’ was WOTN. The other 3 bottles were excellent, but not on that level. I normally wouldn’t want four great wines in one evening, but in the context it worked perfectly. 7 people, 6 bottles (not every one completely drained), 3+ hours to taste, talk, contemplate. Outside my regular format, but wonderful.
Drink 'em when the spirit moves you.
Dan Kravitz
What I think about y’all’s great wines is that you should be sharing them with broke millennials like me!
I love this advice. A few months ago, I took a hot air ballon ride for the first time. It was a birthday gift for my partner and totally cool experience. Anyway, there we were, floating above the Connecticut fall foliage, and a thought popped into my head out of nowhere: “I’d like to open that bottle of Ygrec I have sitting in my cellar”. I’d never tasted Ygrec before, and I had only the one bottle, but I popped the cork that night, again totally on a whim, and boy- it was very delicious and also perfect for the occasion: both of us still a little giddy from the balloon ride.
There are two formats I’ve really come to like. We have a regular dinner group in San Francisco with six people. Nominally it’s one bottle per person but often ends up being a few bottles over, though in that case we usually just end up with leftover wine, which doesn’t bother me.
The other format is dinner with my wife and two other couples, occa three. In that case I usually do a flight of related wines like a short vertical. These people all like good wine but range from totally non-geeky up through myself.
Either of these works for whatever bottle. Four people is great as well. I’m less likely to open a great red with just my wife as we’ll usually already be into a bottle of Champagne.