A Relaxing Glass of Wine

The wine critic for the Las Vegas Review-Journal has found an under-$10 Pinot Grigio called Kris that he highly recommends.

Good for him.

When I find such a wine, this is what I tell consumers: Chill. Drink.

Not him.

This is what he says it looks like: "…star-bright core going out into a faint glass-clear rim definition with almost unreal high viscosity…"

This is what he says it smells like: "…fresh notes of crushed white fruit from pomelo, white cranberries, stone rose, white flowers, Asian pear, and subtle hints of rose and white corn…"

This is what he says it tastes like: "…ultrasuave with a sweetish pear and white currant entry followed by citrus rind, dried apricots, buttery anise components…"

This is how to serve it: "…at 53 degrees Fahrenheit…"

In a way, I kind of love this guy. I mean, how many wine critics care so much that they want their beverages served with a thermometer instead of a swizzle stick?

Unfortunately, this kind of pedantry makes people hate wine. It's time to do something about him. I suggest a couple of mob guys take his palate out to the desert and bury it.

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It's impossible to explain in a few words what my friend Charles Scicolone, wine director of the shop Vino on West 27th Street in Manhattan, wants from wine. No matter what I say I'll get it wrong and get in trouble. It's a good thing that Scicolone is one of the nicest people on earth, because he doesn't come across that way when he's talking about wine.

To sum it up: He pretty much hates everything wine has become. He likes the way wine used to be.

I know he likes Italian wine. I know he likes aged wine. I know he likes wine that does not taste of new oak—what is called barrique wine.

The other day he opened a few of his favorites at a restaurant called Pizza Fresca on 20th Street in Manhattan. I don't know if the pizzas are always as good as they were that night, but if they are, this place makes the best pies in Manhattan.

If you want to try wines unlike those that are fashionable these days—highly extracted, highly oaked, and not particularly typical of the regions from which they originate—you should stop in at Vino and purchase a few of his wines.

The wine that most fascinated me was a 1982 Tuscan red called Vecchia Annata, made by the Grati family of the Chianti Rufini zone. If you want a 1982 Bordeaux at a shop selling French wines, it could easily run you $400. This wine is about $40. It's classified as a red table wine because it was kept around in the cellars in big barrels for so long it became a victim of official rules and regulations and lost its classification as a Chianti.

It's not a great wine. It's merely a very good wine, made almost entirely from the Sangiovese grape. It's sweet, soft, and shockingly fresh. You'll like it a lot, and you'll understand a little better how Italy is supposed to taste.

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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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Hope & Anchor is a hip bar and casual restaurant in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. It has lots of chrome and feels like a cross between a fifties diner and a fifties soda shoppe, a place where the food would be casual and the staff friendly.

I noticed that the menu contained a beer list but not a wine list, so I asked the waitress if I might have one.

"We took it out," she replied. "It was wrong."

I don't believe she meant that it was wrong to drink alcoholic beverages. I got the idea that there were typographical mistakes on the list.

"But you have wine?"

"Yes."

"Can I see some kind of list?"

"No."

"Is there anything I can see?"

"No list. You want red or white? I can tell you what they are."

"I don't know which one I want. That's why I like to look."

"In that case I can't tell you what they are. Too many."

I've never before been in a restaurant that sold wine but didn't want its customers to have any.

I ordered a beer. (They were out of my first choice, which meant the beer list was wrong, too.)

I also had dinner. I can report that the food was so mediocre there was no reason to regret not being able to drink wine with it.

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I have no idea what made Eric Ripert so mad.

Here's what I had written: "Try the 1995 Krug Champagne for $240, a perfect match for steak tartare."

I was reporting on the new restaurant Landmarc, in New York's Time Warner Center.

The steak tartare is excellent there. The 1995 Krug is excellent anywhere, but at $240 per bottle, it's a steal on a wine list. Yes, sometimes a $200 bottle of wine can be a bargain.

Right after writing that I got a telephone call from Ripert, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin in New York. He said I was wrong. He claimed Champagne was too delicate to match with steak tartare, which is highly seasoned, chopped raw meat.

Generally, I don't like to argue about food with chefs. They know more than I do. But Ripert is the chef of a seafood restaurant. He prepares fish 99 percent of the time, and he drinks red Bordeaux with everything. I will concede that he is one of the best chefs in the world, but there is no way that he knows more about what wine to have with meat than I do.

We arranged a challenge.

He would prepare steak tartare.

I offered to bring the Champagne.

He said, "I don't want the bad corked wine you have in your cellar in my restaurant."

He was sure in an ugly mood. That's what can happen when you always drink red Bordeaux with fish.

Came the day.

He brought out his steak tartare.

Despite the contention, I will be gracious. I concede that this fish cook had created the best steak tartare I've ever had in my life.

I didn't expect that. I knew he'd get the seasonings right. He's good that way. But I never expected him to be brilliant with raw meat. In many ways his steak tartare was typical: filet mignon, capers, cornichons, red onion, parsley, Tabasco, Worcestershire, Dijon mustard, and so on. But I'd never tasted steak tartare so silken and so layered with flavor. He said the meat was hand-cut. Nice, but that couldn't have been the answer. Then he said he had added a secret ingredient: The fat from foie gras. Genius.

He claimed the tartare with a delicate non-vintage Champagne didn't work—the meat overwhelmed the wine. He was right. Then we tasted it with a rosé, which has more body, and he conceded that it matched up well. He even admitted that the high acidity of the wine was mouth-cleansing, as I knew it to be.

I asked him to simply admit that I was right.

It was hard for him. He managed to say, "You can say that you are not wrong."

He said the steak tartare required a bigger, richer Champagne than the rosé. I asked him what that might be.

As though he had just come up with the idea, he replied, "I think 1995 Krug would work well."

The people who make wine have all sorts of euphemisms for really bad years. They say they're "useful," which means they can sell them to restaurants, which in turn dump them on customers who don't know any better. In particular, you hear a lot of off-year Bordeaux referred to as "restaurant wine." Supposedly, this means the wines are ready to drink, but what it really means is that the wines have no chance of aging.

There's another kind of year that isn't of interest to collectors. It's a year that isn't quite good enough, but isn't really so bad. If you know your years, or if you occasionally check out vintage charts, you'll see certain years that are well-regarded but somehow overlooked.

For years, I drank 1983 Ports, which were cheap and absolutely first-rate. I think they were overlooked because the 1985 vintage got everybody's attention. I suspect 1996 and 1999 California Cabernets, excellent wines, are thought of as very last century and aren't particularly coveted. But my favorite find these days are 1997 red Burgundies. The wines are seldom great, but they are soft, sweet, and early maturing—that means, drink them right now. Because the dollar was high and the growing conditions suspect, they didn't cost too much.

Nothing is better than a perfectly mature red Burgundy. Nothing. None of my okay-year Burgundies will approach the power or profundity of, say, a well-stored 1985 Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche, but they might have similar characteristics: sweet fruit, pleasing acidity, hints of glorious decay in the nose. And the prices will be remarkable. I went off to Cru, a Manhattan restaurant with one of the best wine lists in America, in search of some '97's, in this case the least expensive ones. I have to warn you, though: Red Burgundy is almost never cheap.

I had two '97's I loved, a Volnay "Vendages Selectionees" from Michel Lafarge for $140 and a Nuit Saint Georges premier cru Clos des Forets St. George for $90. The Volnay, which in theory should have been the lesser wine, was not, simply because Lafarge is the greatest of all producers in that appellation. It had such wonderful structure I suspect it will last another 10 years. The Nuit St. George, from an excellent but less heralded producer, was more typical of the vintage—soft and round with a light body, but the sweet, slightly oaky, cherry-like bouquet was an absolute delight. If you liked those, in a few years start looking for the 1999 red Burgundies. It was an even better vintage, and it might be nicely forgotten by then.

While I was in Vegas, I found myself in a table game.

No, not poker or craps. Lunch.

The place: Mario Batali's Enoteca San Marco, a casual restaurant located in the Venetian hotel's attractive rendition of a Venice piazza.

I told the sommelier I was looking for a fresh, fruity wine with lunch, but also that I was intrigued by the 1997 Sandrone Valmaggiore, a wine made from the nebbiolo grape, as are all of Sandrone's great and wildly expensive 1997 Barolos.

At $75, the Valmaggiore had to be a steal, right?

So wrong. It was quite bad.

Reddish-brown, dark, brooding, well over the hill. A barely drinkable wine, totally without fruit or charm. On the other hand, it wasn't technically flawed. It was just no good.

I told the sommelier—anyway, she said she was a sommelier, even if she didn't act like one—that it was unpleasant, everything I didn't want in a luncheon wine. In fact, it was nothing anybody would want in a wine, regardless of the time of day.

She looked at me as though I was making no sense.

I invited her to taste it and tell me what she thought. She said she would take it to the wine director of the restaurant to get his opinion.

She returned 10 or 15 minutes later, after we all were well into our appetizers, and said, "He tasted it and said it showed the way a '97 of this varietal should show now."

She stood there, waiting for me to make the next move.

This is where matters stood at this very dumb restaurant: I was angry. The guests at my table were unhappy because they had expected wine with their food and were without any. Basically, the sommelier's boss had called for a confrontation over a wine I would guess cost him no more than $25 wholesale. Had she taken it away and brought something else, the restaurant would have had a happy table of customers and he would easily have made up the $25 loss on the substitute wine.

Instead, it was showdown at the gondola canal.

I told her we'd pay for the wine we didn't like. I told her to take it away. I ordered a different wine—a cheaper one, since I no longer had respect for the wine program of the restaurant. And since the place was billing itself as an "enoteca," a term used to designate a wine bar with food, that meant I had no use for Enoteca San Marco at all.

We finished the lunch. The waiter brought the bill. We did not get charged for the rejected wine. At the end, the restaurant did the right thing.

Still, it shouldn't have been that difficult. And the lesson wine drinkers should take away from my experience is: Stick by your beliefs. I don't like having to pay $75 for a wine I know should have been taken back without complaint, but I would have. Had we ended up drinking the '97 Sandrone, as the wine director wanted us to do, it would have ruined our lunch. That's too high a price to pay.

The price the restaurant paid for its rigidness? It lost three customers. (Actually, that's not such a fatal error in Vegas, since few people have an opportunity to come back anyway.)

By the way, there was a bonus. As my friends and I left the restaurant, a gaggle of strolling entertainers entered the simulated piazza. Not only had I won the game, the fat lady started to sing.

Winemakers claim to hate the 100-point scoring system used by critics, even though it works well. Their complaint is that wine is so magnificent it transcends analysis by numbers.

They never say a word against critics who utilize another kind of system, one that forecasts when a wine is going to be ready to drink. My complaint is that such a prediction is nonsense.

You see it all the time. The name of the wine, followed by something like, "Best from 2009-2014."

Basically, the critics have no idea. They're guessing. Most wines—maybe 99 percent—either don't age or get worse with time. And of the ones that are predicted to improve with age, an awful lot of them don't.

The only exceptions are wines with history. Those that have consistently reached maturity (defined by secondary flavors, sediment, and other good stuff) can reasonably be expected to do so again. Thus, wine critics can calculate the aging potential of classic wines such as Bordeaux, vintage Champagne, and Grand Cru Burgundy.

Probably the most puzzling and indecipherable of all wines are California Cabernet Sauvignons, which appear to have the potential to age beautifully but rarely do. They are excellent when young, possibly even better after hanging around for a couple of years, and then they tend to lose their luscious flavors with time.

Occasionally, they demonstrate a uncanny ability to not change at all, a phenomenon also seen in vampires and socialites. Vintage port is even sturdier—I believe the true definition of infinity is the length of time it takes a vintage port to mature. If you're tempted to become a collector of pricy red Bordeaux, remember that they are seldom worth drinking unless a quarter-century has passed or if somebody else is picking up the check.

Auctions serve countless purposes, but they are most fascinating when history goes on sale. The Duchess of Windsor's jewelry. Elvis Presley's jumpsuits.

And this weekend, at a Hart Davis Hart Wine Company auction in Chicago, Steve Verlin's wines.

Verlin, who died in his sleep last year, was the Diamond Jim Brady of my generation. He ate and drank like nobody else I've known, surpassing even the trencherman I most admire, the eminent wine critic Robert Parker.

Here's what a friend e-mailed me after watching Parker and Verlin go at it in France, at the Restaurant Greuze:

"Verlin vs. Parker. Steve nudged ahead with the fourth serving of foie gras. And quenelles preceded the foie gras."

Only once did I dine with Verlin, and that was at a wine lunch that featured, as I recall, more than 20 different bottles, including a Champagne that was at least 70 years old. I'm lucky to remember that much. I barely remembered my own name, let alone what was served.

Diamond Jim Brady lived and ate, not necessarily in that order, from the mid-19th century until early in the 20th. He died at age 60. The owner of one of the restaurants he regularly patronized supposedly called him "the best 25 customers I ever had."

Verlin reigned from the mid-20th century until 2006, when he passed away at age 58. He was a less predictable eater than Brady, who tended toward lobster, crabs, oysters, and beef.

For Brady, it was the Gilded Age. For Verlin, it was more like the Guilden Age.

Parker, in a website tribute, described a number of extraordinary dining experiences with Verlin, including the time they ate at the home of the famous Rhone winemaker Gerard Chave. As Parker recalled, Verlin was "just off the plane from his beloved Jersey…has at least 20 lbs of Sabrett hot dogs…kosher mustard…and special rolls…all hand-carried on the plane to show Chave what a great American hot dog was all about."

Verlin dined gloriously, of course, but he also liked to shock guests with such pairings as truffle-laced popcorn (with Cristal Champagne), his beloved Sabretts (with Vega Sicilia Unico), and Krispy Kreme doughnuts (with Chateau d'Yquem).

I was looking through the catalogue of the May 4-5 sale and noticed that one of my favorite Italian wines, the 1993 Soldera Case Basse Brunello di Montalcino, lot 1766, is estimated at $1200-1800 for a lot of 12. It's a bargain.

If anybody who obtains it would be kind enough to invite me over, I'll bring the mustard and dogs.

Krug is unusual Champagne. The name doesn't sound French. (Founder Johann-Joseph Krug was a German immigrant.) Nobody uses the stuff for Mimosas. (Too expensive.) And it certainly isn't suitable for sipping outdoors on a sun-dappled day. (Too profound.)

Krug makes a non-vintage Champagne labeled "Grand Cuvee." It's called "multivintage" because Krug rightfully believes the wine deserves a category all its own. In great years it also makes a vintage Champagne that combines the distinctive Krug style (intensity, power, elegance) with the characteristics of the particular growing season.

Krug 1996 has just been released. It lists at $250, but you can shop around and do better.

Many people who purchase vintage Krug—wine collectors in particular—like to cellar it. That's because they believe it's rarely fully mature upon release and because bringing out a bottle of the 1988 or the 1973 is certain to evoke gasps from your guests.

The 1996 is an unusual Krug. I think it's ready to drink right now.

The vintage was a great one. (Most Champagne houses released their 1996 bottlings years ago, and the best of those, to my taste, is Dom Perignon.) The 1996 Krug is golden—darker than you'd expect for a newly released wine—with deep, creamy, honeyed notes. The depth is enormous. So is the acidity, remarkably high for a wine that appears to be made from somewhat overripe grapes. It's a maxed-out wine that brilliantly expresses the uniqueness of Krug. With this particular Champagne, you can experience the greatness of Krug without waiting around for it to get better.

It tastes totally mature. Because of that, if this were any wine but Krug, I wouldn't expect it to age particularly well. But you never know with Krug. When I made precisely that point to Olivier Krug, the director of the house, he replied, "If it does, it does."

That's yet another unusual aspect of Krug. Although it is the most prestigious Champagne house in the world, it has few pretensions. Added Olivier, "It's our own strange snobbiness. We are the Champagne that ages the best and we have the highest purpose for aging, but we don't care if it does or does not."

I wish to declare myself the greatest blind taster on earth.

In a very specialized way.

Blind tasting, as wine drinkers know, consists of identifying a wine without seeing the label or, for that matter, the bottle, which can give away a lot by its shape.

I play this game often. It's amusing, and it requires the taster to think a lot about wine. It's also challenging. The other day I was poured a glass of a dark red wine and asked, as usual, to identify it.

Generally, I would start with trying to guess the grape, then the country of origin, then perhaps the year. In the unlikely event I would get all of those right, I might try for more obscure characteristics, like the region or even the winery.

In this case, I knew precisely what the wine was.

"About $60," I said.

I was real close.

When you think about it, that's all that counts in wine these days. We want to know how much it costs. The taster who can guess that must be considered a superb oenophile. Yet I don't believe any of those fanciful degrees that wine geeks seek, like Master Sommelier or Master of Wine, requires expertise in this matter.

I now consider myself Master of Price.

The wine I tasted was a California Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2001 Terra Valentine Wurtele Vineyard. To be honest, I don't believe I can guess the price of anything except a Cabernet or a Chardonnay—these varietals aren't particularly subtle and they tend to go up in cost in direct proportion to richness, oakiness and depth of flavor. They're very straightforward.

The Terra Valentine had plenty of wood, and an unusual combination of both plentiful acidity and soft tannins. The pleasure was immediate but limited, a little rustic. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to open up, become more complex, or age particularly well. It was, however, quite forceful, as an about-$60 wine should be.

I liked it. Had I been scoring it by the more common 100-point scale, I would have given it an 89.

I looked it up on the Wine Spectator, where it was praised for its intensity and brawniness but criticized for "a cheesy, dry character" and awarded a very mediocre 85. Oh, well. I never said I was the world's best at anything except price.

This is the headline that topped the press release: 816 WINNERS ANNOUNCED IN FIRST WOMEN'S WINE COMPETITION.

The next line: All-Star Panel of Women Judges Chooses Medal Winners at Inaugural Competition.

The first quote: 'Women have spoken," said Lea Pierce, Director, National Women's Wine Competition.

What's this all about?

A little further down in the story we learn the ugly truth. Women are tormented. By men. Yet again.

The story adds, "…most wine competitions are predominantly male affairs, and the wine media tends to be dominated by men."

This is too absurd to tolerate.

Nothing about wine these days isn't about women.

Every wine story I read is about how women are better wine tasters than men.

Every profile of a winemaker I read in a food magazine is about some woman who has taken over the family vineyards.

Every restaurant I visit has a woman sommelier.

I'm in favor of every one of those developments. I just want women to shut up about how the wine world is only about men.

More from that press release: "According to Pierce, if any conclusions can be drawn from this competition, it is that women love a wide variety of tastes and styles."

What might we conclude from that? Of course. Men are the opposite, beasts who guzzle thick red wine, getting most of it on their shirts.

I am drunk with rage.

Let me tell you something about men and wine. Pretty close to 100 percent of the time, we pay for it.

Put that in your press release.

First it was the three-martini lunch. Gone.

(I have to say, it was never a great idea. The last time I had one of those, about 25 years ago at the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, I was with a former U.S. Assistant Attorney General who drank his three and became enamored of a woman dining alone at a table near us. He decided to win her affections by bringing over the remains of his half-eaten chocolate cake, never doubting that she would swoon with pleasure. I'm proud to say I held him back.)

Now it's the ritual of wine with lunch. Almost gone.

This is Wine Week at the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group. That means that the nine Smith & Wollensky steakhouses throughout the United States, as well as five other restaurants operated by the group only in New York, are offering luncheon customers tastes of 10 different wines for $10 through this Friday, March 23.

Quite often, vintners show up to pour their wines. It's cheap. It's fun. Some of the profits go to charity. It's even educational, since you will certainly taste wines you haven't tried before. The wines selected for the tastings are not from jugs, nor are they the bum stuff in bins found just inside the front door of wine shops.

Perfect, right? Not quite. I'm sad to admit that I'm one of those cowardly people who no longer drink wine at lunch.

I love wine with lunch. I have always thought that wine is better in the light of day, when it sparkles, than at night, when it broods. Wine at lunch makes me happy. Wine at night makes me sleepy. Still, I stopped, because that seemed the prudent thing to do.

I suggest those of you who no longer drink wine at lunch try it this week. (Persons who operate heavy machinery or drive school buses are requested to ignore this advice.) See if it makes you happy. I know I haven't been quite the same since I stopped.

I remember taking a fellow to lunch at the restaurant L'Express in Montreal. He was a hard-working civil servant in a tedious job, and he drank an entire bottle, as he did every day at lunch.He said to me, "My friends ask me, 'How can you possibly drink a bottle of wine and go back to work in the afternoon?' "

I asked him what he told them.

He replied to me, "I tell them, 'How can I possibly go back to work if I do not?'"

If you are a normal person, there's no reason to read on.

This report is for people who have 1982 Bordeaux in their cellars. I assure you that I do not, but I know some people that do. They are overzealous, and they often behave oddly in the presence of what they call their "cellar treasures," but I always appreciate invitations to their homes.

Recently, I was invited to a private dinner featuring six of the greatest Bordeaux from the celebrated 1982 vintage.

Let me make you even more envious. The meal was cooked by Lee Anne Wong, who is an executive chef at New York's French Culinary Institute and a maestro behind a stove. You might know of her because she finished fourth in the first edition of Top Chef, the reality cooking show on Bravo.

(I don't wish to appear unkind, but I've eaten the food of a few of the cooks who finished ahead of her, and whenever I run into Wong, I generally ask, "How the hell did you lose to them?")

My rich friend with the wine cellar brought out Mouton-Rothschild, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion, and La Mission-Haut-Brion. All but La Mission-Haut-Brion are classified as "first growths," which means they cost so much even a lot of rich guys can't afford them. If you are one of them, a rich guy without 1982 first growths in your basement, I recommend that you read no more. You will start wondering why your life is so meaningless, despite the money you have accumulated.

My friend supplemented the first growths with a few other 1982's, such as Krug Champagne and Domaine Leflaive Bâtard-Montrachet. But I digress. Let's get down to the red wines.

(Oh, maybe not. The Leflaive, served in a magnum, was extraordinary. It wasn't a bombshell, but it had become elegant and profound in its old age. If only that should happen to us.)

Interestingly, my friend served no so-called "right bank" wines, the ones from Pomerol and St.-Émilion. He had bought the best ones, including Pétrus, at the time of their release, but he subsequently sold them all after declaring them uninteresting. That's particularly noteworthy, because Pomerol is thought of as one of the triumphs of the 1982 vintage.

My feelings about red Bordeaux are simple: When consumed young, they're wasted. When properly aged, they're unsurpassed—even by great red Burgundies.

So I wasn't surprised that the wine I liked best at this dinner I now consider one of the best of my life. I'd put it in the all-time, top-ten club.

It was the Latour.

Latour is not generally my favorite Bordeaux. I'm a Haut-Brion guy, which merely did okay at this meal. Some of the other drinkers voted for Mouton, La Mission, or Lafite (subtle, elegant, and ethereal, my number-two wine of the night).

I'm supposed to say something sportsmanlike now, such as, "Each man is entitled to his opinion." Let me say this: They were wrong.

I'm not claiming that at another tasting on another night one of the other six wouldn't have finished ahead of the Latour. When you're drinking old wines, you have to expect bottle variation. This bottle turned out to be the best Latour I've ever tasted. (I had a an opportunity to try 1945 Latour once in my life, and it was tragically corked.) The color was bright, clear, posh, a glowing garnet with the barest hint of age.

It was simply luscious, not an adjective I'd use often with old wines. The fruit hadn't diminished at all, but instead had become cleaner, purer, deeper. It offered insights into a better wine world.

I found myself bowing my head—or perhaps I was just transfixed by Wong's squab, miraculously soft and moist yet with a hint of crispness, served in a black pepper gastrique and accompanied by parsnip purée and spinach with garlic crisps.

Sometimes I can understand why people aspire to more money than they need.

Waiter, There's a Fly…

The wine was magnificent. I suppose that's why the fly dove right in.

The wine was a half-bottle of 2001 Domaine Cheze Cuvée de Breze Condrieu. The young fellow dining with me had never tasted a wine from the French appellation Condrieu, where you can find the ultimate expression of the viognier grape.

You might have tried viognier. Many vintners in America are producing it, for two reasons. It's potentially great. It's difficult to grow. After all, a man can't spend his life cultivating Cabernet Sauvignon, a vine that grows like a weed.

Drinking viogner from Condrieu is like tasting Swiss cheese from Switzerland or Kobe beef from Japan. There's nothing like the real thing.

The Domaine Cheze, by the way, was magnificent, as good a Condrieu as I've ever tasted. It was almost too thick, and I never expect that level of intensity from viognier. It had aged wonderfully, and I never expect that from a viognier, either. It tasted like peaches and pears that had acquired nobility with age.

But there was a problem. That fly. It had found the best wine in the house, which was a stunning accomplishment for a fly. It had committed suicide, which was less impressive. Finally, it had ruined about a quarter of a $65 half-bottle of wine.

What to do?

The sommelier did better than I would have expected. He removed the glass, dumped the contents, and returned with a clean glass. He poured more from the old bottle. Then he did something astonishingly generous. He brought us a second half-bottle, on the house.

I'd never been in quite this situation before, so I called an old friend, Daniel Johnnes, the wine director for the restaurants of chef Daniel Boulud. I asked him what a diner can expect if for some reason a glass of wine is ruined through no fault of his own. (On one occasion a waiter dropped a green bean in my wine, but the wine was rather vegetal anyway, so I merely scooped it out and drank on.)

First, he made fun of the situation.

He said, "It depends on whether you were sitting indoors or outdoors. If outdoors, there's the question of who the fly belongs to and who is responsible for it. If you're indoors, the restaurant has to concede that it's their fly."

Then he admitted that the gesture had to be made, whatever the circumstances. What makes this a thorny problem rather than a simple one is the enormous cost of wine these days. "It's not like replacing a chicken if a fly has landed on it," he said. "The chicken cost $5. The wine might cost $1,000."

He says he would first ask the customer what he wanted done. The customer might tell him to remove the fly—or whatever the object happened to be—with a spoon and bring back the glass. In such a case, no decisions need be made.

He says if a fly found its way into wine that was served by the glass, he would automatically bring a new glass of wine to the customer.

He says he would even replace a partially drunk bottle with a whole new one if it were reasonably priced. Whatever wine remained in the old bottle could be taken to the bar and served by the glass. Or if the diner graciously said not to bother, he would make some other gesture, perhaps bring all at the table a glass of dessert wine.

"But it's impossible to replace a wine like a 1985 LaTache," he says.

He says if that happened, the proper thing to do would be to deduct a percentage of the cost of the bottle from the bill, roughly in proportion to what was lost. Then he would make another gesture. Once again, it might be complimentary dessert wine.

He wanted to make one more point.

"There are no flies in Daniel's restaurants," he said.

Well, Maybe Not All

The new issue of GQ has an excellent package entitled "All You Really Need to Know About Wine." I have to say, it's pretty good, and not entirely because I contributed an item called "Five Wine Tips That Will Change Your Life."

By the way, I wouldn't ignore these tips if I were you. This isn't the kind of pseudo-caring crap you get from Dr. Phil. This is practical information that will immediately improve your social life.

I'm so proud of those tips that I've come up with five more.

1. A waiter's corkscrew, resembling a folding knife, is the only kind of wine opener you need. Buy one with a foil-cutter that pops out of the handle. Novices will gaze at you in awe.

2. When ordering wine by the glass in a restaurant, always ask when the bottle was opened. If it didn't happen that day, keep asking until they come up with something that was. This greatly diminishes the risk of getting a wine that's gone bad.

3. Pay no attention to challenges from wine geeks. Particularly obnoxious questions include: (a) "Do you think this wine was fermented en barrique?"; (b) "Did the aftertaste linger as long for you as it did for me?"; (c) "Don't you notice a hint of brett?"

4. Learn to identify a corked wine—it often has a musty, wet, locker-room-towel smell. Allowing your guests to drink a wine contaminated with TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) is more embarrassing than walking around with your fly unzipped.

5. Memorize a wine phrase that sounds intelligent. I continue to say, "Wasn't there hail in the vineyards in '83?" (There was, but who cares anymore?) Everybody, not just novices, will gaze at you in awe.

It's also a good idea, when you take your mother to dinner, to order a German Riesling Kabinett. Finally, you'll have done something to make her proud of you.

Yes, I'll Have Fries with That

Last week The New York Times printed a business section column with the headline, "I'll Have Fries and a Glass of Your Best Champagne." It was the story of a hungry wine expert stuck in a hotel with nothing but a room service menu and a ravenous appetite. She said what she accidently discovered was "the oddest pairing that's ever worked for me."

She ordered French fries and a glass of Champagne. She was astounded by what she called a "perfect pairing."

Champagne is absolutely the easiest wine to pair with food, so I'm flabbergasted by how often people decide a near-miracle has occurred whenever this takes place. They think Champagne is difficult, almost certainly because it has tons of acidity and millions of bubbles.

Here's what you do: Think of a glass of Champagne as a glass of beer. Works every time.

Of course, most people think of Champagne as ethereal and lovely, a romantic drink. Well, it might be that emotionally, but it isn't that technically. Champagne is one tough customer, able to stand up to salt, grease, and fat. The reason it is so often paired with caviar is that it washes your mouth clean of the salty, fishy aftertaste of sturgeon eggs.

The other day I drank Krug Rosé with smoked salmon. It worked fine. What remained of the bottle was even better the next day, when I paired it with hot dogs and beans.

Merlot—Beverage of Connoisseurs

Very little thrills me more than picking up the wine list in a restaurant and seeing something extraordinary at a price I can afford. I'll bet book collectors get the same buzz when they walk into a junk shop and find a first edition of Carrie offered for $8.99.

Recently, I came upon a magnum of 1992 Beringer Howell Mountain Merlot at The Earle, a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was priced at $155.

No, you can't rush over there and get your own, because this was the last magnum, although I can enthusiastically advise patronizing The Earle if you appreciate great California reds with age on them. The list is very good overall, but the selections of first-rate California reds are astonishingly priced.

(Want a French red instead? The 1996 Chave Hermitage is $135 there, $150-$175 in most wine stores.)

I was particularly thrilled about the Beringer Howell Mountain, because I believe it is the best merlot made in California, and I think it has been for more than a decade.

That 1992 had the advantage of being in the magnum format, which is the equivalent of two bottles and provides ideal aging conditions. The wine wasn't just smooth and supple, which seems to be the first priority of American merlot consumers, but it also boasted gorgeous, black-cherry-like fruit and the rarest of all California wine attributes, a lovely bouquet. (Ever notice how many California wines are deficient in that?)

I know Merlot is over. Everybody who used to drink it now wants Pinot Noir. And it is true that French Merlots, particularly those from the Pomerol appellation, tend to outperform California merlots.

But that used to be true of Pinot Noir, too, and now California Pinots Noirs are competitive with a great many red Burgundies. There's no reason why California Merlots, given the success of Beringer, can't do just as well.

Man, Did I Get Marbled Last Night

The most startling wine news to come out of Australia while (or "whilst," as those Aussies like to say) I was there was an announcement that Wagyu cows like to drink.

Yes, in Australia it's no longer red wine with meat. It's red wine in meat.

The cows are served Pitchfork Cabernet-Merlot-Shiraz, a fruity little blend that sells for about $12 a bottle and has been praised by one critic as "delightfully friendly." I'll bet it won't be any longer, now that it knows what's drinking it.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a Japanese celebrity chef visiting the Margaret River give the idea to the directors of a company that produces Wagyu cattle, which are praised for their well-marbled meat—that means the steaks are full of tiny veins of fat that add richness, tenderness, and flavor. Japanese producers of Kobe and Wagyu beef pamper their cows with beer (as well as massages and music), and the chef thought wine would do just as well.

According to John McLeod, the director of Margaret River Premium Meat Exports, the wine is being mixed in with the feed and each animal consumes a liter a day for 60 days—that's about $950 worth of wine, should the company be paying retail. McLeod reported an increase in appetite and calmness in the cows.

I was unable to locate the wine in Sydney. That might be because it is in enormous demand, now that it is be being sold not by the case but by the herd.

Pitchfork is produced by Hay Shed Hill, a winery in the Margaret River. The wine comes with a screwcap, which is understandable. You wouldn't expect cows to be able to use a corkscrew.

The Three Muscadets

I recently stopped in at a wine tasting that featured a lineup of Muscadets from Domaines Pierre Luneau-Papin going back to 1976. Extraordinary. Muscadet is one of those white wines that isn't supposed to evolve and that you're not supposed to drink after two or three years. (Actually, you should drink almost every wine young unless somebody you trust tells you otherwise.)

Muscadet comes from the Loire region of France, which is famous for wines made from the Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc grapes. This one is made from the Melon de Bourgogne, sometimes called simply Melon. It's not famous. It's not underrated. It's okay. On most bottlings of Muscadet you will see the words sur lie, which I believe is French for "this grape doesn't have much going for it so we have a trick to extract more flavor." The juice lays around on dead yeast cells for awhile, which sounds gruesome but adds complexity.

Traditionally, Muscadet is crisp (that means it tastes acidic), minerally (that's quite desirable), and floral (producers pray for that to happen). It's one of those $12 wines that is always considered perfect with shellfish because it has no sweetness and no oak. I like it, but then I like wines with noticeable acidity. I'd never thought of drinking it after it aged.

I was told at the tasting that older Muscadets can develop a flavor profile similar to the great white Burgundy, Meursault. My initial reaction: Wishful thinking. The simplicity of the Melon de Bourgogne grape would suggest otherwise, but acidity should never be discounted. It promotes aging, and almost anything can happen to a wine that hangs around for a long time.

I didn't try them all, but I had the 1976, the 1982, and the 1995, all considered good years. All retained their fabulous acidity, but only the '82 had a hint of what I suspected to be that Meursault characteristic: a touch of pleasing earthiness. I have to admit, it made me smile. All three of the wines were alive, however, still fresh, and a lot more fun to taste than the standard lineup of Chardonnays that I see at most white wine tastings.

In case you don't find any of those old-timers at your local wine shop, and you probably won't, try the 2005 Luneau-Papin Muscadet-sur-Lie Pierre de la Grange, a cuvée produced for the American market. It's unexpectedly rich, yet retains that startling acidity. If you have yet to understand the wonders that acidity works when wine is drunk with food, here's a perfect way to begin.

The Numbers Game

The Wine Spectator, not my favorite periodical, awarded a score of 84 to the Bartolo Mascarello 2001 Barolo, an $80 wine. By now almost everybody knows how the 100-point scoring system used by wine critics works, but in case you're still drinking Riunite Lambrusco from the seventies and haven't caught up, it goes something like this: 95-100 means great, 90-94 means excellent, 89-85 means good, and under 85 means you get challenged to a duel by the winemaker. This is especially true if we're talking about a venerated wine from a legendary producer in a terrific year. A 2001 Barolo from the late Bartolo Mascarello qualifies. (His daughter now makes the wine.)

I'm not a fan of the Wine Spectator's journalism, and by that I mean the stories. Usually, I don't believe a word I read. On the other hand, I've never had a problem with the wine scores. I use them, and I follow the recommendations. Again and again, the buying advice is correct.

I also know that not all wine professionals are as kindly and generous as I am. Many of them do not admire the way the magazine scores wines. I thought the Mascarello controversy offered a perfect opportunity to check out the Wine Spectator's scoring standards, simply because both sides have weighed in.

The magazine wrote of this wine: "Very funky… Smells like a warm room with two wet dogs in it." The well-respected Sergio Esposito of Italian Wine Merchants countered, saying it was "a gorgeous wine, with not a hint of damp puppy to it." He tacked on the opinion of an Italian wine writer who claimed the magazine had launched a personal attack on the Mascarello family for not cooperating with the press.

I bought a bottle of the wine and invited the wine editor of a leading American publication to taste with me. I didn't tell her why I was evaluating this wine. I didn't allow her to see the bottle. I told her only that I wanted an opinion. She was "blind-tasting." I was not.

We poured. The wine was light brick-red, the benchmark—some would say "curse"—of an old-fashioned Barolo. So-called traditional producers don't go for new oak, huge extract, or an opaque color profile. The Italian Wine Merchants said of this style, "There is a handful of gladiators who continue to protect this past way of life and resist all temptations to bow to commercial pressures."

I looked the wine over carefully. I have to say, this was one really light red wine. The wine editor sniffed. "Serious funk," she said. "Something funky is going on here."

She tasted. "Nothing there. No fruit, just an earthy, mushroomy character."

I didn't get as much funk as she did. I thought the earthiness was borderline, more intriguing than off-putting, but then I knew it was a traditional Barolo and she did not. I agreed with everything else she said. We both thought the wine had mouth-gripping tannins and high alcohol. We both thought it offered no promise of joys to come.

I told her what I'd paid. "Insane," she said.

I told her the score: "Too high." She thought it should be closer to 80 points.

I know what admirers of old-style Barolo will argue: Give it a dozen years, and then watch how it develops. I don't think it will. They would argue that I'm a typical American who doesn't understand traditional wines, only fruit bombs. I would argue that the word "traditional" is the new refuge for inferior wines. In past years, bad wines were often excused as being "elegant." Now they're "traditional."

It proves what I have always thought. Where wine scores are concerned, the Wine Spectator is your friend.

Life Can Get Simpler

Here's a headline from a recent edition of The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the paper of record for America's Bedouin community (I can't imagine any other people living in that desert): "Chilean wine great match for king crab legs."

The wine was Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc, an inexpensive Chilean wine that seldom rates headlines, even though it is perfectly pleasant. I have no argument with either the choice of wine or the author's decision to craft seven paragraphs on the oenological glories of this under-$10 beverage, even though his enthusiasm was a little out of control. For example, he described the wine as having a "…clean, clear core, going out into a faint almost glass-clear meniscus…" I'm a squeamish guy. Once wine writers start that meniscus talk, they're going too deep into a wine's personal life for a prude like me.

What annoyed me wasn't the overwrought wine talk. It was the writer's pronouncement that the wine was "…the ideal match for king crab legs."

Let's assume for a moment that the Mojave Desert supports a thriving colony of king crabs, and that it's a regional product in abundant supply. Even with that, the reference is nutty, as is almost all writing about food-and-wine pairings. I offer some advice: Pay no attention. I'm sure Veramonte Sauvignon Blanc does go well with crab legs, but so will almost any dry, crisp, unwooded white. If you ignore all writing about matching food and wine, your life will improve. It's nonsensical culinary trivia.

Some wines have traditionally matched up with certain foods. For historical reasons, it makes sense to pay attention to them. I don't mind reading that Sauvignon Blanc (like that Veramonte) goes well with goat cheese or sweet Bordeaux with terrine of foie gras. What I can't abide, primarily because it uselessly complicates a simple pleasure, is the idea that every food must be technically matched with a certain wine.

Here's a straightforward set of rules for pairing wine with food. It will work 99 percent of the time. (1) Taste the food. (2) Immediately taste the wine. (3) If the wine still tastes good, you've succeeded.

Best of the Eighties

These days, critics are supposed to make pronouncements. One of my failings is that I never make enough of them.

I wish to declare the golden decade of French wine-making to be the 1980s. (By the way, the golden decade of American film-making was the 1970s, in case you missed that.) If I could only include 1990 as belonging to the eighties, in the same way as the year 2000 belongs to the 20th century, I'd be even more sure of myself. I'll just say that the 1990 vintage benefited from the residual greatness of the 1980s.

It was quite a decade. Monumental wines were produced in both Bordeaux and Burgundy, and the 1982 Bordeaux wines launched the modern era of wine. Yet the greatest wine of that decade came not from either of those regions but from the Rhône. That wine is La Mouline, a Côte Rôtie from Guigal. This is certainly no surprise to any collector, and it's not as though La Mouline is overlooked. The price of a bottle is staggering. Could I afford them, I believe I'd drink '83, '85, '88 and '89 La Mouline before any other red wines on earth. Recently, thanks to a friend, I was fortunate enough to taste the 1985 side-by-side against a 1986 Grange Hermitage from Australia. That's a fine vintage of a wine I've always considered my favorite.

They're both made from the same grape, Syrah, which is called Shiraz in Australia (Grange also contains a dollop of Cabernet Sauvignon). The La Mouline was easily the better of the two. It was inky, with a hint of the elegant, lead-pencil nose often associated with great Bordeaux. It was so rich it had a syrupy quality reminiscent of a 1959 Bordeaux, yet it also had a hint of the famous Rhône bacon scent.

We drank it at the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse, New Jersey, accompanied by Mishima beef in a black pepper sauce. I don't know much about this particular meat product, except that it originally came from a small island off the coast of Japan and is so rare it makes kobe seem like ground round. It was darned tasty, and a first for me. I've never eaten a course where both the food and the wine were so uncommon I'll probably never have either one again.

Science Marches On

What all of us want is a drinkable $5 wine, don't we? Or maybe what we want is a woman who won't sneer at us when we open a $5 wine.

Wines that inexpensive are not for sniffing or scoring. They don't require a 100-point rating scale. They're strictly pass or fail. They're for gulping, and if you've forgotten how to do that, it's time to stop pondering the meaning of $100 Chardonnays and relax.

Recently I tasted six different $5 wines from Gallo, all of them bottled in standard 750-milliliter sizes. My stash of Gallo Family Vineyards Twin Valley wines included three reds (Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Hearty Burgundy), two whites (Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc), and one sweet rosé (White Zinfandel). I cooked up a couple of burgers to find out which wine matched up best.

I have to say, not one was great with an unadorned burger on a bun. The food was just too bland for the wines and exposed their flaws—yes, all $5 wines have flaws. I pressed on with my experimentation, motivated by a deep commitment to science. I added ketchup.

In doing so, I believe I made one of the great discoveries of my lifetime. Two elemental culinary forces—Hearty Burgundy and ketchup—are made for one another.

Hearty Burgundy, once the most cherished of all American jug wines and now elevated to Twin Valley status, is not Burgundy and is only hearty in comparison to, say, a Volnay, which is a Burgundy. In today's world of mammoth red wines, it's a middleweight. But it seems to have been around as long as wine has been in existence. Gallo is an old Italian name, and I wouldn't be surprised if Hearty Burgundy was the house wine at the Roman Coliseum.

Ketchup, of course, is pure Americana, salsa for the midwest. When I realized that it went perfectly with Hearty Burgundy, I felt like Isaac Newton discovering gravity. Ketchup and Hearty Burgundy are strongly similar in sweetness, flavor profile and body. They go best when the wine is slightly chilled, like the ketchup.

I have discovered the secret of Hearty Burgundy's longevity: It's America's ketchup wine.

Getting It Right, Finally

Duckhorn's Three Palms Vineyard Merlot comes from one of those individual vineyard sites that increases the value of and the demand for a wine.  (Probably only Heitz's Martha's Vineyard is more famous.)  Three Palms was first produced by Duckhorn in 1978, and since then it has represented tradition and dependability.  I have only one problem with it.  The wine is not particularly good.

For decades, Duckhorn's Cabernets have been better than its Merlots.  Among its Merlots, other bottlings are often superior to Three Palms.

I recently tried Duckhorn's 2004 Migration, a $30 Pinot Noir.  I can't recall being more thrilled by a Duckhorn wine.  It was polished and balanced, bright and bouncy, an exemplary Pinot Noir with a smidgen of Burgundy-like earthiness.  It was everything a California Pinot Noir should be, and it came at a more-than-fair price.

Migration doesn't appear to be particularly important to Duckhorn.  You have to poke around the winery website before it pops up as the secondary wine of Goldeneye, its more expensive Pinot Noir.  It is somewhat disparagingly referred to as "a lighter alternative to the rich, structured" Goldeneye.  Even the name, which refers to the migration of goldeneye ducks, isn't that complimentary.  In other words, if you can't get or afford the Goldeneye Pinot Noir, Migration will do.

There's a pattern here.  Goldeneye, the wine with the fancy pedigree, is celebrated.  Ditto for Three Palms Vineyard Merlot.  There's a lesson here, too.  Quite often wineries do their best work when they don't take themselves so seriously.

Big Tipper

Marvin Shanken, the supreme leader (editor, publisher, chairman) of Wine Spectator, went to dinner with three friends and spent $300 on food and $1200 on wine. This was not a financial strain. Add to his many titles this one: The Richest Wine Magazine Owner on Earth.

He tipped $60 on food. That's fine.

He tipped $90 on wine. He admitted this in the current issue of his magazine. Came right out and said it. I've never thought of the Wine Spectator as a gutsy magazine, but Shanken is one gutsy guy. He basically confessed to being The Most Mean-Spirited Wine Magazine Owner on Earth.

The purpose of his declaration, ostensibly, was to encourage a lively discussion of tipping. Such a dialogue could have been useful, but what he really did was proclaim himself one of the most loathed of restaurant patrons, a rich guy who stiffs the help. Tipping in restaurants is not, as Shanken seems to think, about calculating the minimum amount of cash you can get away with leaving on the table. That's an ugly way to end a meal.

Shanken tipped 7.5 percent on wine. You don't have to know a lot about restaurant etiquette to know that you never tip 7.5 percent on anything. Let's say that you—we'll call you Not the Richest Wine Magazine Owner on Earth—have dinner with a friend and order two entrées and a $45 Merlot. According to Shanken, you should leave a $3.38 tip on the wine. Please don't.

I have better advice. If money is tight, ask for one entrée, split it, and leave a good tip. It's better to be hungry than to be a bum.

Give the Wine Guy a Save

Mo's New York Grill is a steakhouse (with a more extensive menu than most) named for and owned in part by Mariano Rivera, the much-loved relief pitcher for the New York Yankees. The restaurant opened last month in New Rochelle, a modest city in Westchester County, instead of in Manhattan. One might suspect the advantage of such a location would be plenty of parking, but Mo's has none. Surrounding streets are lined with one-hour meters, many in operation 24 hours a day. When I asked the maitre d' if quarters were available for patrons, he replied, "No." Welcome to Mo's.

The steaks are of pretty good quality, the rolls tasted a day old, and the lobster tails were easily the worst seafood I've had this century—salty, overcooked, and fishy. Eat one of those and you're headed for the 15-day disabled list.

The wine list was perplexing. It offered more than 75 selections, but only two of them included vintage years. Back in the bad old wine days, a trick employed by greedy restaurants was to purchase name wines from bad years for practically nothing and sell them at a high price to uninformed customers. There can be a lot of profit in bad years.

Much to my surprise, that didn't appear to be the motive at Mo's. I asked our waiter to explain the absence of vintage years. He said, "He couldn't get the years he wanted so he didn't put any on." It sounded to me as though "he"—whoever "he" was—had nothing but good intentions but got frustrated by his inability to access the wines he wanted. Still, leaving off vintage years makes no sense. Instead of a customer being disappointed when he looks over the list, the customer picks out a bottle, waits a long time for it to arrive, and is disappointed when he finally sees what it is.

I asked our waiter to find out the years of two red Burgundies, and somebody in a suit came over carrying both of them. The one listed as a village-level Pommard turned out to be a 2003 Jadot Pommard Clos de la Commaraine, a premier cru of some distinction. The price was $62, which is about what you'd pay for the wine in a retail store. The wine was young, but it had plenty of denseness, complexity and acidity, great for a steak.

It was the best part of our dinner. After one visit, I'd say Mo's needs plenty of work, but what's most easily fixed is that wine list, which is a lot better than it looks. The old hidden-ball trick no longer works in baseball, and the old hidden-vintage trick isn't appropriate in restaurants anymore, either.

Not Screwed At All

What all serious wine drinkers fear from the substitution of corks with screwtops is that aged wine won't taste the same. After all, years in contact with an organic material such as cork is likely to alter flavors. I sure don't care about the other major concern—that corks look expensive and screwcaps look like they belong on a $5.99 bottle. I don't think you should care, either. Screwtops do a great job if you're drinking the wine when it's young. No question about that.

But what about a wine with a few years in a bottle? I recently tried a 1999 PlumpJack Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon with a screwcap—I consider seven years to be medium aging for a California Cabernet. I wondered what the effects would be.

The wine was brick-red rather than vivid purple, a sign that the aging process was nicely underway. I detected two of the classic signs of a nicely developing Cabernet, spice and black currants, scents I'm reasonably certain wouldn't have been there at the time of bottling. Another plus: It was a lovely drink.

PlumpJack has been bottling its Reserve Cabernet with both corks and with screwcaps since 1997, as a test of divergence, and the winery claims that no noticeable differences have been detected. (The 2003 reserve is about to be released, if you want to conduct your own experiment.) It's too soon to tell for sure, but if screwtops continue to be successful, corks are doomed. And a lot of trees are saved.