I used to love poking around wine stores, searching through bins containing specials and bargains, on rare occasions finding a great wine that had been overlooked or misplaced. It was an enhanced version of shopping at flea markets or garage sales. Wine offers far more pleasure than you get from picking up an antique rocking chair too fragile to actually use.

Those days are gone. Wine shops are efficient and computerized, and thanks to the comprehensive ratings churned out by wine critics, bargain hunters are unlikely to come across a bottle of wine that nobody knows about.

The same goes for restaurants. Even the most celebrated of wine lists, such as those at Cru and Veritas in Manhattan, are mostly for limo-to-lunch customers interested in the collectible and the well-known. If they're looking for a bargain, it would likely be a Georges Roumier 1990 Musigny for $2900 rather than the $3900 they'll pay at a place less interested in giving customers a fair deal.

Cru and Veritas have great lists, but they're not for me. I'm happiest when I come across a big, slightly out-of-control list where I can rummage through the pages. I love a little disorganization. I love it when I'm ready to move to a new section of the list and I have no idea what's coming next, except that it's going to be intriguing.

I'm crazy about the wine list at Crabtree's Kittle House in Mt. Kisco, New York, which is about a hour outside New York City. Many people like to watch a great film like The Godfather over and over again, never tiring of revisiting favorite scenes in the hope of coming upon something they've never noticed before. That's what this list does for me.

It's huge, with about 6,000 wines. If you want to go through it carefully, you have to get to the restaurant at least an hour before the rest of your party, because you'll need at least that much reading time.

John Crabtree, who owns the restaurant, told me that when his father bought the place in 1981, the list was basically a bunch of wines sold by a local distributor, the kind of list I used to see in Chinese restaurants that didn't care about wine.

The restaurant started paying attention to wine about 1986, and within a year they were buying seriously. The goal, Crabtree said, was "to have something for the little old lady celebrating her birthday, as well as for the guy who put together a $10-million deal and wants to celebrate with Coche-Dury." (In case you haven't put together a deal of your own lately, Coche-Dury is the most prized and costly producer of Meursault and Corton-Charlemagne.) He says almost everything the restaurant owns, and that amounts to tens of thousands of bottles, is on the list except for a couple hundred bottles not quite ready to drink and "a few mistakes nobody wants to drink."

I fall somewhere between the matron and the mogul in my wine tastes. I look for bargains in the $50-$100 range, although I'll occasionally go higher if it's a wine I've always wanted to try or one I've particularly love—the Kittle House list has the best Alsatian wine I've ever tasted, 1989 Zind-Humbrecht Rangen de Thann Riesling, for $190, and the only reason I haven't bought it is cowardice. I have such astounding memories of the wine I'm afraid I'll be disappointed this time around.

There's so much else I want to try, anyway, and from every desirable region and producer: Recently I drank a 1997 Rene & Vincent Dauvissat Les Clos Chablis. Producers have messed around with the style of Chablis so much in recent years that nobody ever gets to taste what classic Chablis is supposed to be—rich, steely, and concentrated, with enormous minerality. This bottle delivers an advanced lesson in Chablis for a hundred bucks.

I could go on for thousands of words, listing the wines I want to drink. Chave, Dageneau, Ramonet, Donnhoff, Grange, Kistler, Marcassan, Peter Michael, and on and on. The sommelier, Don Castaldo, helped put together the list and knows everything. You're probably going to want to eat while you're there, and the chefs, Anibal Romero and Kevin Bertrand, are first-rate. (Have their trio of foie gras with one of the sweet Alsatian whites.)

Come on up to my part of New York some day. I can't get any of my friends from Manhattan to make the trek—people who live in Manhattan never go anywhere, except by plane. I'll pick you up at the train station. I'll even pay my share of the check if you let me order the wines.

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Floyd Norris, the well-regarded financial writer for The New York Times, made a fascinating—and totally weird—point in his column recently.

He claimed that fashionable clubs charging as much as $1,600 for a bottle of Champagne, and grossing as much as $12,000 per night from a single table of revelers, are in effect helping to redistribute the wealth in America.

In the old days, he pointed out, the U.S. Government assumed that task with confiscatory federal income taxes that took as much as 91 percent of the money that the very rich earned.

Today, the tax rate is way down. So, he says, money that went from the rich to the general public by means of taxes now has to make its way down through the efforts of private enterprise. Interesting idea.

He wrote that "outrageously priced drinks at fancy clubs can be seen as simply taking money from those with too much of it, and passing it on to others."

I swear, this was not tongue-in-cheek. I looked for tongue-in-cheek. I know that tongue-in-cheek isn't what New York Times columnists do best, but I was hoping he wasn't serious.

I think he was.

He never did say who gets this redistributed income. He simply said that those are who receive it "may not be the most deserving."

Unfortunately, his column stopped there. If he had continued, he might have revealed a fundamental truth about life in modern America. Let's carry on from where he left off.

It is the club owners who benefit? To some extent, yes, but the ridiculous establishments they operate are notoriously short-lived, and it's more likely the owners are in it for notoriety rather than profit.

Is it the staff? Are you kidding? Nobody cares about the working man today. The waiters and busboys might earn a few extra dollars in gratuities when swells buy those $1000 bottles of wine, but we all know that club owners have come up with all manner of ugly schemes to retain a great deal of the tip money for themselves.

Who is left?

You should know. Who hangs out in these clubs? Who shows shows up trailing a posse of freeloaders? Who expects to pay nothing?

Celebrities, of course. Britney. Paris. So many others.

More and more, it is celebrities who benefit from all of our largesse. They get all that America has to offer.

Redistribution of wealth to them is only one of a multitude of perks that come their way. After all, Lindsay Lohan can't be spending her own money on booze—she needs it to pay for rehab.

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Food critics tend to develop conservative tastes. We visit so many restaurants serving artificial cuisines that have been developed solely to attract publicity or dazzle a jaded public that increasingly we find ourselves craving simple, satisfying food.

I had a stellar example of such a meal recently. It was traditional French food, and it made me regret that restaurants serving such fare don't have a place in American cities anymore. I'm not certain they have a place in French cities, either.

The chef was Jacques Pepin, one of the great stars of the American culinary scene. You love his books. You watch him on television. You adore him. Yet you probably never eat the food he prepares best.

He was cooking at the James Beard House as part of a series called Masterpiece Dining. Yes, the food contained a lot of butter. If that's why you no longer desire classic French food, I can't do much but admit defeat.

The first course was a substantial potato soup, smooth and creamy, topped with a scattering of small, buttery, homemade croutons that floated exquisitely, not sinking a millimeter. If you ever wondered why croutons exist, which I do, you would understand better after experiencing this perfect expression of contrasting textures.

The second course was codfish with black butter, which helped me recall why I used to like cod. The sauce, with just a hint of bite from vinegar and capers, added to the fish everything it lacked: richness and tartness.

The third course was roasted squab with tiny fresh peas in a squab jus. Fresh peas seem to be somewhat forgotten, whereas once they were revered for their sweetness and their association with the beginning of spring.

The wines were traditional, a series of flights from the producer Bernard Magrez. I wasn't surprised that the wines I liked best with this meal were two Bordeaux: A 2002 Pape Clement white—mostly minerals and toasty oak—and a 2003 Pape Clement red—a blockbuster of a young Bordeaux, intense and full-bodied. I would not have expected it to be ready to drink at such a young age, but it was heavy with fruit, and the tannins were so soft it went down easily.

With the exception of the squab, which I suspect was cooked a little rarer than it might have been in 1965, this meal felt as though it belonged in a different era, that of at least 30 or 40 years ago. It was a historical memento from the days before nouvelle cuisine changed the world.

Perhaps my only culinary regret is that I didn't eat nearly enough French food back then, but, to tell you the truth, I couldn't afford it.

Got a beef with Alan Richman?
In need of food-and-wine advice? E-mail him at AlanRichman@GQ.com. He’ll respond each week right here on ‘Forked’