This wine critic gig began as a form of moonlighting.   On my passport it says I’m a novelist, and my previous books have all been works of fiction.   I’ve had daydreams about accepting the Pulitzer Prize for fiction since I was seventeen; until recently I never really imagined myself standing in a cellar of Château Lafite at ten in the morning tasting the new vintage out of barrel, let alone publishing a book about wine.

It all started about twenty years ago with a phone call from Dominique Browning, an old friend who’d recently been given the mandate of resurrecting House & Garden, the venerable Conde Nast shelter journal.  In her wisdom, which runs pretty deep, Dominique decided that in the new post-tuna casserole America, she wanted to cover wine as well as food, couches and nasturtiums.  And apparently she decided that it would be fun to hire an enthusiast who was not necessarily a specialist.    Those assembled at one of the early staff meetings liked the idea.  However, when the concept was fleshed out with my name, I’m told that eyebrows were raised, while jaws and even pins were dropped.    The feeling seems to have been that I had made my name, such as it was, by writing about people who abused controlled substances and ravaged their nasal passages.  (See Bright Lights, Big City, Vintage, 1984)  What the hell did I know about wine?

Good question.  As Dominique pointed out, I knew a little more than might be expected.  As a friend she was aware of the fact that I had suffered a mild and relatively benign case of  oenophilia for years.  I was a collector and a drinker,  a reader of wine journals and wine catalogues.   And a talker.  In providing an outlet for my passion she may have been thinking  of our mutual friends, some of  whom were possibly getting tired of listening to me hold forth on the subject.

My only formal credential in the wine trade was my year of employment at the Westcott Cordial Shop in Syracuse N.Y.    I worked as a clerk for minimum wage while studying writing with Raymond Carver and writing my first novel.   The neighborhood was a marginal one, situated between the university and the ghetto, and while we displayed bottles of vintage claret—I specifically remember the bottle of 1978 Smith Haut Lafitte with its blue and yellow label–they tended to collect dust; much of our trade was in the area of industrially fortified grape juice–selling Wild Irish Rose and Night Train to guys with bad hygiene.    Still, the proprietor of the shop was a Princeton man who had an extensive wine library on the premises and high hopes for the eventual gentrification of the neighborhood.     I used to dip into the wine library between robberies and grad school assignments.  And I used to dip into the stock when I left at night, it being the tradition among the clerks to supplement our paltry income with the odd bottle of Yugoslavian cabernet.

I worked my way up from the cheapest bottles of Eastern European table wine—we had quite a few in the two dollar range—all the way up to the Spanish bubbly, which at that time cost five or six bucks.  It wasn’t a bad way to learn.  Later, after my first novel was published and became a bestseller, I was able to afford some of those vintage clarets.  By then I had developed the start of a palate.  I certainly knew what bad wine tasted like.   In Between Meals, A.J. Liebling makes the case for starting one’s gastronomic apprenticeship near the bottom of the food chain.  “If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite,” he says, “the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference about the size of the total.”     The same can be said of wine.  The poor man, the budget drinker, is forced to make choices and sacrifices which can only sharpen his discrimination and his appreciation of competing pleasures.  Starting at the top one will miss out on the climb.

Perhaps the most significant event in my continuing education as an oenophile took place under strictly literary auspices:  having quit the liquor store a year before, I was in London for the English publication of Bright Lights, Big City, where my English editor threw a party for me.  Among the many people I met that night was the English novelist Julian Barnes, whose brilliant novel Flaubert’s Parrot I had just read and admired.   I can’t quite remember how it was that he came to invite me to dinner—Julian is not the kind of guy who indiscriminately spews invitations—but a few nights later I found myself chez Barnes.  Perhaps we had discussed wine at the party—when I arrived he had decanted two bottles of what I would later realize were legendary Châteauneuf-du-Papes, 1962 and the 1967 Jaboulet Les Cedres.    I didn’t have much respect for Châteauneuf at the time, perhaps because it was the red wine I had first learned to appreciate when I was in college.  By then I thought of it as a beginner’s wine.   As soon as I tasted the sixty seven I realized I had a lot to learn.   This was the beginning of my own love affair with the wines of the Rhone.

Julian was a year or two ahead of me in terms of his vinous education and his collecting—already he had a pretty significant cellar, composed mainly of clarets and Rhones.   Subsequently I realized that drinking with Julian was like playing tennis with a slightly superior player—in fact he was a superior tennis player as well—the best possible way to learn and to sharpen your game.

Bordeaux was my first love as a wine drinker.  It’s easier to understand than any other French wine region.   Which is not to say that it’s simple.  Clarets (as our teabag friends call the red wines of Bordeaux) age better than any other, acquiring amazing complexity over the years.   But they are also more consistent than, say, Burgundies.  And yet Burgundy is the wine that I eventually came to love the most, though in the meantime, I would explore the wines of California, Italy and most major wine growing regions in between thanks to Conde Nast’s generous travel budget and the encouragement of food editor Lora Zarubin, who usually travelled with me.

When House & Garden folded in 2006, I thought I would retire from the wine writing biz, but the Wall Street Journal approached me to write a wine column and I spent the next three years doing so before I began my gig as the wine critic for Town & Country magazine at the behest of my old friend Jay Fielden, who was the editor.  As I write this I am about to embark on a new vinous adventure writing about wine for Air Mail, the sprightly and sophisticated online publication.  Bottoms up.

When I first met Lora Zarubin I never could have imagined that we would find ourselves locked in adjacent cells in the police station of a provincial French town at 3 in the morning. In fact I never thought I’d see her again after our disastrous first encounter, which took place in 1995 at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons hotel. My friend Dominique Browning had recently been appointed editor in chief of House and Garden and she’d decided to ramp up the magazine’s coverage of food and wine. She’d already hired Lora as food editor and Lora was quite adamant that there should be a regular wine column. Dominique, a longtime friend, knew about my passion for wine, and she thought it would be interesting to have someone outside the field write about it. When she proposed me, Lora and some of the other editors were aghast. I was known for, among other things, for writing about people who abused controlled substances and Lora found it hard to believe I knew much about wine. I had a reputation as a party animal; no one had ever accused me of being a connoisseur.

When we got together for lunch with Dominique, I confirmed all of her worst suspicions. I’d been out until the wee hours with my friend Bret Easton Ellis the night before and I was not, as we say of certain wines, showing very well. I was kind of a wreck and not entirely able to hide it. We were in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, surrounded by moguls sipping mineral water. I felt seriously misplaced and miscast. There were Mort Zuckerman and Mort Janklow and Henry Kissinger. And downtown fuckup brat pack novelist me. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk about wine, much less drink it. However, I was eventually able to impress Lora somewhat with my knowledge. Despite my condition I guessed the provenance of a glass that was given to me blind. I think the only person more surprised than Lora when I identified the wine correctly was myself. One would have to say it was a grudging admiration at best, and I believe Dominique gave me the job over Lora’s protests, but suddenly we were colleagues. Neither one of us could have imagined how intimate that association would become.

Lora was appalled at my lack of knowledge and enthusiasm for California wine so she dispatched me there to begin my education. From the start our respective roles in the Conde Nast hierarchy was ill defined. As food editor and full time employee she had a kind of supervisory role over my column. I guess she thought of herself as my boss, whereas I thought of her as my assistant. Luckily, I knew more about wine than she did. Not much more, but enough. On the other hand she had an extraordinary palate; she was a great blind taster and was able to parse out the scent and flavor components of wine better than almost anyone I’ve ever known. She was also a great cook, an utterly passionate about food; I didn’t know all that much about food, wine’s boon companion, and Lora, who had once owned a restaurant in the Village, was to become my tutor in the joys of cooking and eating, although not without a fight, or rather, many fights along the way. So far as I know we were the only two Conde Nast employees who were sent to couples counseling by our editor.

I’m still not sure how Lora became my travel companion, how she convinced Dominique to pay for her to accompany on all wine-related trips. I think she must have suggested to them that I wasn’t to be trusted on my own and it’s true that I’m very absent minded and badly organized. Lora is the opposite. I don’t want to say she’s anal retentive, but on the other hand I can’t think of a better phrase at the moment. She organized the trips, made the calls, held the tickets until the gate, and drove the rental car. She hated my driving and early on banned me from the driver’s seat. I was happy enough to be the navigator and happy to have everything taken care of. For the next twelve years we logged tens of thousands of miles across Europe, the States and South America. We visited the best winemakers in the world, people like Angelo Gaja, Robert Mondavi, Richard Geoffroy (of Dom Perignon) Helen Turley and Baroness Phillipine Rothschild. We became friends with these people, some of them early in their careers. We dined with them at some of the best restaurants in the world. We drank too much with them. We even flirted with some of them. At least I did, and in fact I would have gotten lucky on a number of occasions if not for Lora’s interference. Just when I thought she was asleep, she would rise and bang on the door of my hotel room to ruin my seduction of a hot young Prada-wearing winemaker in Barolo. She was determined not to see me sleep with anyone I shouldn’t be sleeping with, although she didn’t always succeed. She claimed it wasn’t professional, but her own vehemence seemed strangely personal, her ostensible jealousy all the more interesting since she was gay.

Lora somehow imagined that she was in the closet when I first met her, or else she imagined that I was too much of a heterosexual clod to notice that she was gay. About two years after we started working together we were on a wine trip in the Napa Valley and she made me sit down and watch the two-hour “coming out” episode of the Ellen Degeneris show. It was her way of letting me know. “Well, hon,” she said, afterward—she called everyone hon—“can you guess what I’m trying to say?” I pretended to be surprised, and we had a weepy, huggy scene and opened a bottle of Dom Perignon. I became the confidant of her love life, and she of mine. My third marriage was starting to unravel during the years I first traveled with Lora and she listened to the whole story. She was a wonderful confidant and advisor, and probably should have gotten extra pay for all the listening she did.

Food was an important part of our bond, almost as important as wine, though we didn’t always agree on what, or how, to eat. A disciple of Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, Lora believed in simplicity of preparation and presentation. She loved to grill over an open fire; she often told me that one of the most memorable meals we shared was an outdoor asada, a cookout of virtually ever part of a recently living cow on the slopes of the Andes in Chile. She believed that the best restaurants in France were one star or no star, that these were the places one was likeliest to find honest, regional food, whereas I loved the haute cuisine and drama of the two and even three star places. We were always struggling and clashing on this front. As she told a friend recently, “Jay believed in treating himself well, very well. We might have had four hours of wine tasting along with eating the food that gracious vintners always offer but Jay had to end the day with a two star meal. Often Jay ended up eating alone or inviting a stranger to join him, even if that stranger spoke a language he didn’t in a country we knew little about.”

One night I convinced her to go to a famous two-star restaurant in Avignon and it was hard to know who she was madder at—the chef, or me. “This food is so phony,” she said, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. “It has no soul. It has no sense of place.” She was right about that one, though she grudgingly came to admire Alain Ducasse’s three star restaurant in Paris, one of my favorites, even as I came to see the point of her no star crusade. One of the best meals we ever had was a lunch at Elizabeth Bourgeois’s unstarred restaurant in Provence, sitting out in the courtyard surrounded by birdcages and trees laden with cherries. Laura somehow knew about the place—I think she’d been there before. We started out with the best tomato soup I’ve ever had in my life, accompanied by a local Viognier, and later, after one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life we drove a few miles up the road to visit the man who’d made the Ligonier and taste more his wine.

Our split on the Michelin star issue may have partly reflected the fact that she was the keeper of the expense account, the one who had to go back to New York and try to justify a nine hundred dollar meal at Taillevent. We both became prisoners of our roles in a way, me acting the part of the spoiled epicure, Lora taking the part of the disciplinarian, although were usually able to see the humor in the clash. Not infrequently we would drop the roles and collaborate, when we saw a particularly amazing bottle of wine on a list, calculating how much Conde Nast would be willing to bear and how much we would thereafter chip in together to get what we wanted. Such was the case when we were dining at Beaugravieres in the Rhone Valley, which is famous for its wine list and for its way with black truffles during the season. We, naturally arranged to arrive during truffle season. We knew that the 1989 Chateau Rayas on the list was a relative bargain at around two hundred dollars but we knew there was no way the magazine would pay for that and the truffles so we asked the proprietor to cut the bill in half; the magazine would pay for half and we would split the other half.

Memorably, there was no argument about the bill or about anything else when we shared Easter lunch, 1999, at La Tour D’Argent, looking out the window at Notre Dame and listening to the bells. (I wasn’t even annoyed when she told me that I didn’t know what it was like to be raised a Christian. I had to remind her that Catholics were Christians; Lora had been raised in a strict, fundamentalist household, a source of much guilt and torment later in life.) We agreed that the pressed duck wasn’t the best thing we’d ever eaten together but it was absolutely essential that we order it, the restaurant’s signature dish.

As with so many other foods, Lora introduced me to black truffles, and decided that we should make a pilgrimage to the source, namely Perigord, also noted for its gut-busting cuisine, much of which involves ducks, geese and their livers. (I’d discovered white truffles on my own, more or less by accident, when I was on a date shortly after I arrived in Manhattan and a waiter offered to shave them on our pasta. I nearly had a heart attack when the bill arrived but I craved them from that day forth.) Lora had somehow befriended the Peyberre family, truffle dealers extraordinaire, and we had we had an extraordinary dinner at their home in Perigueux during which we stood beside the stove with Madame and learned seventeen uses for black truffles, while drinking copious amounts of Cahors, the inky Malbec of the region.

Typically, somewhere around the fifth or sixth day of travel, of eating two big meals a day and drinking like fish, Lora’s liver would give out and she would have a meltdown. She would scream at me, threaten to go home, threaten to quit her job. Sometimes it would happen when I failed in my role as navigator and we found ourselves stranded on a dirt road in Tuscany with no clue as to our whereabouts. Sometimes it was a disagreement about a particular wine. Sometimes it was the matter of the hotel room. She was convinced that sexism was at work whenever I got a better hotel room than she did. A simpler explanation, possibly, was that my reputation as a novelist was sometimes responsible. My books were very popular in France and Italy, which were our most frequent destinations. But when I tried to suggest this to Lora she told me I was being self important. One of the more curious aspects of our relationship was her conflicted feelings about my reputation as a novelist. At times she would brag on me, and my novels, and at other times she would seem to deny that it was possible that anyone could possibly be aware of my other line of work. I think its possible she was jealous of this other career, the one in which she didn’t participate.

Lora was a witness to the disintegration of my marriage; and when I finally sold the four bedroom apartment uptown that I’d shared with my wife and kids, she found me an apartment in her own building, the London Terrace in West Chelsea. We liked having one another as neighbors although she came to regret the fact that I was directly above her; she claimed to be able to distinguish the mating cries of the different women who visited me, and even when I was alone she claimed that I thumped and stomped on her ceiling. At least once or twice a week though, finding myself alone, I would go downstairs with a bottle of good wine and she would cook for me, a ritual we repeated on Sept 11th, 2001, after we watched the towers fall from our picture windows. She ran upstairs to wake me after the first plane hit, but I was already up, earlier than usual, and I’d seen the first plane hit while I was standing on a chair in front of the window trying to fix the chain on my blackout shade. That night we opened the best stuff we had handy, a bottle of 1982 Lynch Bages from my stash, a bottle of 1990 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle from hers. We figured we’d better seize the day, the future being very uncertain. It’s a principle I have tried to continue to observe ever since.
~ ~ ~
That fall, on a trip to Alsace, we spent the day with the great Olivier Humbrecht and his beautiful English wife, drinking old wines and eating the first white asparagus of the season. I think we were both pretty hot on Olivier’s wife. We had some the best white asparagus I have ever had in my life, washed down with a spectacular 1990 Zind Humbrecht Muscat. That afternoon we drove two hours south to visit Bernard Antony, a great affineur, or cheese master. Antony served all cheese dinners for a perhaps a dozen guests a few nights a week and Lora was determined to dine there, distance be damned. We had a hell of a time finding the unmarked house in the little town of Vieux Ferrette, but eventually found Antony, who took us on a tour of the caves under his house and eventually served us some forty or fifty cheeses, and a great deal of wine. Antony kept opening special bottles for us once he learned that we were wine buffs. I remember a perfect farmhouse Munster, which he served with a Riesling from Boxler, and a soft, creamy Brie de Meaux with a Trimbach Pinot Noir. After a three-hour cheese bacchanal Lora once again insisted on driving us back to Strasbourg. An hour later we were pulled over at a roadblock. The cops had no choice but to arrest Lora once they got her blood alcohol reading.

“What about your husband,” asked one of the cops hopefully? “Maybe he can drive.” The last thing they wanted was the headache of dealing with foreigners, of processing our arrest. Unfortunately my blood alcohol level was higher than Lora’s. So we spent the next few hours at the police station, talking with the cops and periodically blowing a new test. We spent our first hour in adjacent cells but eventually they deemed us harmless and let us hang around the office. None of the cops seemed to speak English and we both speak pretty bad French but I recall a lively and intricate conversation with the gendarmes that night. I remember that Lora kept telling that I was very famous writer, which seemed to impress them, France being one of the few countries in the world where writers rank high on the social scale. Finally, close to dawn, they dropped us off near the car and told us to get out of their jurisdiction. I promised I would get my French publisher to send them some books but somehow I never got around to it.

Every year or two one of us would threaten to quit the magazine after suffering some slight at the hand of the other. After I missed a plane to Paris, where I was supposed to meet Lora to write about wine stores, I explained that the fax they’d sent me had been blurry and I read six thirty as eight thirty. (Actually true, I arrived at JFK at six thirty, having just missed the flight, and finding that the cheap ass ticket they’d bought for me was non transferable.) No one, especially Lora, seemed to believe me. I was unable to reach her that night and she went absolutely ballistic when I reached her in Paris the next morning. Indignant at this lack of trust, I threatened to quit. When she finally returned Dominique prescribed—insisted upon—couples counseling for the two of us, and offered to pay for it, or rather to have the magazine pay for it. We did three or four sessions and they helped a lot, though we still had one or two breakdowns to go.

I was staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel in October 2007, doing a gig at the LA Library, when I got an e-mail from Lora with the subject line HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE MAGAZINE? When I reached her she told me she’d been called into a meeting in Dominique’s office that morning where the staff had been told that the magazine was shutting down. We’d been hearing the rumors for years and were almost inured to them. Almost from the moment Dominique had taken over the magazine her rivals had been predicting its failure, but she’d lasted for twelve years, as had I, which, when I thought about it, surprised me. Writing a wine column seemed like a lark and I certainly hadn’t intended to stretch it out this long. I didn’t know until it was over that it had been one of the great adventures of my life.

I was fortunate in having a parallel career, but I worried about my colleagues and about Lora in particular. Eventually, she found a job with the L.A. Times as a Food Editor, just in time for its bankruptcy filing. She commissioned wine pieces and complained to me about the quality of the writing. I saw her a couple of times on trips to Los Angeles. We went to the opening of Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Los Angeles, but it only served to make us nostalgic for the multi-course feasts we’d shared at the French Laundry in Napa. I’d made the mistake of inviting a group composed of individuals all of whom were easily as high strung and neurotic as Lora herself—not that hard to do in L.A., actually—and no one really seemed to click. Lora seemed to be in a bad mood; she eventually told me the newspaper was hemorrhaging and that her salary had been cut in half. In 2010 she moved back to New York to work as a personal chef for Annie Liebowitz, an old friend. She’s recently been working hard at creating the perfect loaf of sourdough bread and judging he samples she dropped off at my house in the Hamptons this summer I’d say she’s getting close. We talk about doing a project together; a movie producer who was at the dinner at Bouchon later expressed an interest in commissioning a screenplay about our travels together but that idea seems to have gone the way of most Hollywood pitches.

Now, when I visit a wine region, I don’t have to worry about anyone else’s itinerary; there are no fights about driving, or choosing a restaurant, or expenses, no jealousy about rooms or waitresses. I still love to discover new wines and to meet the people who make them, to share meals with them and walk their vineyards, although now and then on these journeys I feel something, or rather, someone, is missing.

An Essay from THE JUICE 2012

 Just back from Burgundy. Yeah, I know, sounds great. If I had a bottle of La Tache for every person who’s said how lucky I am to get paid to taste wines in places like Napa and Bordeaux and Burgundy I’d be one very happy wino, but the reality of the wine writer’s job—even a part timer like myself—is not necessarily as glamorous as it sounds. Sometimes you wake up in the morning in your rented apartment in Beaune with a little bit of a mal de tete, (aka a gueiles de bois) and that handheld shower thing is not really working and you stop at the café and grab a really bad coffee, which is pretty much the only kind they have in France, and a really good croissant, (though there are bad ones too) before driving up to Nuits St. Georges to taste and spit wine in a really cold cellar at 9:30 AM. Or you find yourself tromping a vineyard in the rain and wonder if your feet will ever be warm and dry again.

On this recent trip I was accompanied once again by my friends Beaver Truax and David Russell, wine retailers from New York and Berkeley, respectively. This was David’s 33rd trip to Burgundy and Beav has been about half as many times, so I appreciate their perspective—this being only my fifth trip to the Cote d’Or. I rendezvous with David in Paris and take the train to Beane; early the next morning we wake and drive to the Macon with Beav and Russell Hone, the great gourmand/Burgundy expert who co-wrote a series of cookbooks with the late Richard Olney and has long been married to, and worked with, Becky Wasserman, the American born fairy godmother of Burgundy. (Also with us, Whitney Woodham, a firecracker Alababaman who works for Dominique Lafon in Meursault.)

The Macon doesn’t really get much respect but it’s increasingly worthy of attention as a source of relatively inexpensive white Burgundy and given how expensive, and increasingly unreliable white burg from the Cotes de Beaune has become I wanted to explore it. Unfortunately though, it was about forty degress outside and raining when we arrived at our first appointment to meet the winemaker at Dominique Lafon’s Hertiers de Lafon domain and tour his vineyard in the town of Chardonnay. That’s right, Chardonnay, possibly the birthplace of the grape.

After ten minutes I was soaked, my boots were caked with mud and that was pretty much how I stayed the rest of the day. We tasted at Lafon after that, sniffing and spitting, then rolled out for our next appointment. At four o’clock, after a somewhat revivifying meal at Olivier Merlin’s house, during which I tried to warm up in front of a feeble fire made out of grape vines, we arrived at our third appointment, Chateau Soufrandiere, to discover a lineup of some 25 wines waiting to be tasted. All I wanted to do was take a nap, preferably in a hot tub, and in fact Russell stayed in the car with the heater on and did just that. But duty called. If the wines hadn’t been excellent, and the three diminutive, hyperactive Bret Brothers hadn’t been so excited, I think I would given up half way through. But tasting wines like these is why we bother. Still, we are relieved to finally say goodbye and further relieved when our hosts at our next stop, Domaine Rontet, tell us that they only have three cuvees. But first we tour their vineyards which are on top of a hill overlooking Pouilly, and the wind is howling and the feet are further soaked. These Burgundian vignerorns love you to see their vineyards. But the wines, once again, two Pouilly Fuisses and one Saint Amour, are very good, as is the dinner that our host and hostess Fabio and Claire prepare later in the eighteenth century chateau for our weary band and all the winemakers we visited earlier in the day. We drink a lot of fine Macon and Beaujolais, and top it off with some 75 year old Calvados brought by Russell. It was a great night, although as I flopped into bed at a nearby bed and breakfast, too tired even to read another chapter of J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights, the thought that I had four appointments the following day in Beaujolais was somewhat daunting.

1. Drink less, but better. I don’t necessarily expect to keep this one, but I like to make it every year, and at the end of the year I can tell myself I’m batting 500; even if I don’t drink less, I do tend to drink better as I learn more and as the older wines in my cellar reach maturity. And it’s my firm belief that the better the wine, the less it hurts you in the morning.

2. Drink more Riesling. Riesling is one of the food-friendliest wines in the world, and every wine merchant and sommelier you encounter will think you’re cool if you ask for it. Germany is the source of the world’s greatest Rieslings, which tend to be low in alcohol and high in refreshing acidity. Many people are scared away by the notion that German Riesling is sweet, but a little residual sugar nicely balances the high acidity. In fact, the trend in Germany at the high end of the market is toward drier wines, some of which can be searingly citric. The word “trocken” denotes a dry wine, “halbtrocken,” or half-dry, is slightly sweeter. The only problem is that many makers don’t use these terms and it’s not always possible to tell where any particular bottle falls on the scale. So let’s amend that resolution: This year I plan to learn more about German Riesling.

Alsatian Riesling can also be confusing because it’s hard to know whether a wine is completely dry or has some level of residual sugar. If dry is your preference, you can’t do better than the Rieslings from Trimbach, one of Alsace’s oldest producers.

Austrian Rieslings are probably my favorites, almost always dry although some, like F.X. Pichler, can be very ripe and rich. I’ll be drinking more of these, with particular focus on Alzinger, Bründlmayer, Knoll, Nigl, and Hirtzberger.

3. Don’t drink the wine at charity benefits. I happen to attend quite a few of these events over the course of the year. The speeches can really drag on and it often seems the only recourse—short of heckling the speakers or hurling the centerpiece at the podium—is to drink copiously. Unfortunately the wine at these affairs is inevitably inexpensive—in the interest of keeping costs down and delivering more of the ticket price to the worthy cause in question—and almost inevitably lousy. Veterans of the benefit circuit are familiar with the particularly pernicious hangover that can result from swilling plonk for three and a half hours. For some reason the liquor is usually of a much higher caliber than the wine, so my new intention is to nurse a couple of vodka-and-sodas through the course of these evenings. Maybe three if the speeches are really long.

4. Drink more Chenin Blanc. Chenin from the Loire is one of the world’s least appreciated wines. (More on this subject next month.) If I experience a personal financial crisis, I will change this resolution to: Drink more Muscadet. Another Loire white, Muscadet is the best white wine value in the world.

5. More grower Champagne. The best thing to happen in Champagne since the restoration of the bombed-out Reims cathedral after the Armistice is the rise of the grower Champagne movement. More and more farmers who used to sell to the giant Champagne houses are vinifying their own grapes. The guru of the grower movement is Anselme Selosse, who studied in Burgundy and brought back to his father’s domain in Avize all kinds of new ideas, including the basic insight that everything begins in the vineyards. In Champagne, this was a radical idea—the big houses bought grapes in bulk from growers who had little incentive for meticulous viticulture.

Smaller is not always better, but it’s not unlikely that a guy making his own wine with his own grapes is going to take better care of them than someone who sells them by the pound to a corporation. What’s more, while the average Champagne grape loses its identity in a huge blending vat, grower Champagnes reflect the character of a particular site, or village. In a (French) word, terroir: the concept that wine reflects the weather, soil, geology and topography of the land on which the grapes are grown, and that the most unique and exceptional wines come from a single exceptional vineyard. Not all these Champagnes come from a single vineyard—some growers own different patches of land—but most come from specific villages, and experienced tasters can often distinguish between one from Mesnil and another from Bouzy. “Single vineyards are the future,” says Mr. Selosse, whose wines you’re likely to find only on the finest restaurant lists. Other favorites: Egly-Ouriet, Cedric Bouchard, Gimonnet, and Larmandier-Bernier.

6. Give Beaujolais a chance. Is that snickering I hear? Cut it out. True, there’s an ocean of mass-produced, banana-flavored plonk produced in this region and caution is advised. But there are also some beautiful artisanal reds, especially the cru Beaujolais from Morgon, Moulin-à-Vent, Brouilly, Saint Amour and Fleurie, among others. In the right hands, Gamay from these villages produces juice with many of the virtues of Pinot Noir; think of Beaujolais as red Burgundy’s cute younger sibling. The 2009 Beaujolais were terrific, if somewhat uncharacteristically ripe and full-bodied; the 2010s are also very good, if a little lighter and fresher. I will be looking for wines from Jean-Paul Brun, Clos de La Roilette, Georges Descombes and Jean-Paul Thevenet. And I will seek out the last vintages of the late Marcel Lapierre, who died in October, 2010.

7. Beware of bargains when buying older wines. Last year I bought a bottle of 1982 La Mission Haut-Brion from a retailer for what seemed a bargain price. The fill was a little suspect, meaning that the wine had receded down below the shoulder of the bottle—not unheard of for a 30-year-old wine, but a possible warning of bad storage and/or a less-than-perfect seal. I took a chance, because the bottle cost 40% less than it should have. And indeed when I opened the wine a few weeks ago it wasn’t nearly as good as previous bottles I have had. It was more than 40% worse, and hence no bargain. Buying older wines is tricky, and it’s crucial to trust the retailer or auction house, and to get as much information as you can about the provenance of the wine.

8. Don’t forget Bordeaux. The classed growths have gone crazy in price but there’s an ocean of good inexpensive (under $30) Bordeaux from the great 2009 vintage. Look for such unsung appellations as Lalande-de-Pomerol, Fronsac, Côtes de Castillon and Bordeaux Supérieur and makers like Bel-Air, Jean Faux and Chasse-Spleen.

9. Try to get this nasty Burgundy habit under control. Burgundy is like the girl from Bennington who made me miserable my sophomore year at Williams College: She keeps breaking my heart, but I’m obsessed, crazed with lust, spending ridiculous amounts of money on the object of my desire. Because when she’s good, she’s very, very good…

10. Carpe diem. As Andrew Marvell said, if I recall correctly: “But at my back I always hear/Time’s killer taxicab hurrying near.” We’re not getting any younger. Open the good stuff now—and drink it.

– WSJ BLOG December 31, 2011