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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