There are two essential rules to ordering wine in a restaurant: 1. Never presume the waiter has brought the right bottle—read the label. 2. Always assume the waiter has made a mistake with the bottle—read the label.

A corollary is that, when the waiter has brought the wrong bottle, you can indulge in whatever fantasy of punishment and retribution you desire. Our waiter from Elizabeth on 37th , a very expensive Savannah restaurant that allowed us to indulge in possibly our worst high-end dining experience in some time, is currently being bricked up in an airless hole in the wall like that unfortunate gentleman in Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. Heed, reader, as I recount our tale.

We arrived at Elizabeth at 9 p.m. at the end of a brief visit to the city now so entwined in the public imagination with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. (Go out to Bonaventure Cemetery, as gently melancholy a scene of droopy Southern gothic as you could wish, and eavesdrop on the tour guides leading their groups to graves mentioned in the book.) We were led to a nice corner table in an old-fashioned Victorian-looking room that Aldo thought had a certain Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte ambiance—not a bad thing, in Aldo Land, not bad at all—and given a nice old-fashioned basket of biscuits.

Oh, you Southerners and your biscuits!

Our waiter, a brisk-speaking young man in thick black eyeframes, articulated a fairly detailed list of promising specials—notably a salad of lobster, crab and corn assembled on a shell of parmesan and resting on a tomato puree, or something. It was easy to get lost in the Escher-like intricacies of the recipe. I ordered it along with a bottle of the 1999 Clos des Perriers Savenniers. At restaurant prices, it was a wonderful bargain at $59.00. I nibbled contentedly on a biscuit, anticipating the wine. Aldo was rather quiet: He had been thoughtful since we had gone by Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home and been reminded of A Good Man Is Hard to Find: He had picked it up years ago under the mistaken thought that it was a “a saucy gay romp,” I believe was his phrase.

“This,” I said, “could be our best meal in Savannah.”

Which, by the way, it wouldn’t have been hard to be.

We had already had two perfectly competent, pleasant meals at a place called Bistro Savannah, but this town did not seem to be a culinary mecca. There were times, Aldo said as we drifted through the leafy gardens, we would have been better off as giraffes. Then we could have stretched up our necks to graze on the moss so lavishly draping the trees.

We each ordered the lobster-crab-on-parmesan to start, with my entrée being a red snapper on a cauliflower flan and Aldo choosing scallops accompanied by a finely diced ratatouille. The waiter seemed to place special emphasis on the miniature preciseness of the ratatouille.

First, though, came the wine. The waiter handed it to me without a word, expecting ready approval, I assumed. But because of my rigorous approach to tasting, and my unstinting adherence to the two rules, I first read the bottle’s label. And, because I am fully literate, I saw without struggle that what I was being offered was the 2003 Chateau des Epire—in other words, a completely different wine and vintage than I had ordered.

I pointed this out to the waiter. With an unchanging tone of authoritative cheer he told us, well, yes, but they hadn’t had the wine I had ordered in the restaurant’s cellar for some time (then why was it still printed in the list?), and so he had brought us one as “stylistically” close to the Clos des Perriers as possible. And that it couldn’t possibly cost more, anyway.

This was rather astounding.

More precisely, this was galling. And maybe even sneaky.

Did this whippersnapper—oh, I won’t hold back now—did this whippersnapper have any intention of telling us that he was going to let us drink the wrong wine? I repeat: This was astounding. Galling. Sneaky. And not what you expect from an establishment charging $30-plus for an entrée. I wouldn’t expect it from an establishment serving cold pizza.

I decided to let him go ahead and open it, even though it was a 2003 (not a great year for a Loire Chenin Blanc). At least the importer was the reputable and highly dependable Kermit Lynch. And the wine was—fine, I guess: full-bodied, apple-flavored, but lacking in the lean, clean minerality I wanted to go with our seafood.

Still the waiter made no apology, even though his slipup was a grave one. (And was he a rogue agent, or following management’s policy?) It was if I had gone to the library and asked for A Tale of Two Cities, and instead the librarian brought me back Les Miserables with the explanation that it was still a big novel about France. He left us to our appetizers.

I wish he had left them somewhere else. What his description had conjured as an impressive feat of presentation and flavors was in reality a mushy fish salad, a seafood glop, lying inert on a frail cheese taco. Both Aldo and I ate it, possibly hoping to find a miraculous bite of deliciousness by the end. We both concluded in despair that it was a disgusting dish.

And now the evening grew stranger.

I was wrong, you see, about the waiter’s cheerfulness. He had apparently felt the chill of my froideur, and now began to try to make amends for my disappointment. He did this by overcompensating madly (and maddeningly), inundating us with wine. He brought us a desperate parade of opened, nearly empty bottles—probably used for the by-the-glass crowd—and offered us tastings of each as “a consolation prize,” as he put it. A thin Oregon Gewurztraminer, a German Riesling Spatlese and Auslese. We were also given a sample of the evening’s soup and a complimentary salad. It felt like what they used to call regifting on Seinfeld. It felt obsequious and cheap. He did not offer us an apology, or even a full free glass. He did not offer to comp us the bottle of wine that we had not ordered. Instead he kept cluttering up our table coming with these “consolation prizes”—a phrase, by the way, that shifted the sense of error from him back to us. An overly extracted Oregon Pinot Noir, some New World Chardonnay. It wouldn’t stop. He hoped, I suppose, to watch us subside into a state of happy, forgiving inebriation.

Instead, we were jerked back to angry consciousness by the food: My snapper was a dead, dull thing resting on its flan like lichen on a stone. And Aldo’s scallops, while edible, gained nothing from that ratatouille. The rat in the Pixar cartoon would have laughed at this gummy pile of atom-sized vegetables.

We did not finish the entrees.

At least, by now, the waiter had called off the wine assault. In fact he finally disappeared, like a vapor on the summer air, leaving a female colleague to approach us about dessert . . . and the check. We rushed into the warm spring night and back to our hotel. But if we had happened to stumble on an actual garden, however good and/or evil, we would have uprooted the vegetables and eaten them raw. There’s something cleansing about a raw uprooted vegetable.

Aldo and I were staying with a friend in Chicago recently, roughly about the time that 2007 folded its arms across its chest and went off to heaven—late December, in other words—and decided to have dinner at the restaurant called Bin 36. The main draw for us was its corkscrew potential: It is a place that prides itself on its wine list and its skill in pairing those wines with food. Well, that sounded right up our bottle-lined alley. And so we went, my head as ever a sort of food-and-wine interpretation of the seasonal Nutcracker, with visions of vintages and viands dancing dancing with elegant merriment.

What we had in the end was a perfectly pleasant dinner with perfectly pleasant wines. But I felt I had paid for a commodity, then consumed it with a degree of satisfaction sufficient that I wouldn’t demand my money back—rather than achieving my true and constant goal of letting a few of the remaining hours of my life slip away in a fundamental pleasure. The restaurant was fairly upfront about the salesmanship of wine. There was a gift boutique in front and there small blackboard signs in the large dining area promoting wine classes and online merchandise. But no one seemed overly preoccupied with the ambiance. I mean the warm, intimate conviviality that blossoms when the right wine is served with good food. The room felt cold and large as a barn, and nothing in the course of our meal ever really distracted us from this atmosphere. You want the room to close in around you as your wine opens: It was the room that remained open.

The food was good. My appetitizer salad was prepared without distracting fanciness and of proportions that seemed Rabelaisain compared to the neat little stacks of green matter served in Manhattan. We all three of us started with a glass apiece of a gewurtraminer: the 2006 Fitz-Ritter Gewurztraminer Spatlese, an off-dry, very enjoyable wine with lots of fruit and acidity that made for a nice aperitif. Aldo would have rated it higher than I did, I think, but his tastes that night were to be suspected since he had just watched the DVD of Flashdance and kept singing Maniac. With our entrees, a duck breast and a hanger steak, we had a bottle of the 2004 Domaine St. Martin Marsannay Les Champs Salomon. Aldo thought the nose was, at any rate, wonderfully suggestive: He saw himself rolling around a large vat of dried rose petals. The imagery, he said, was borrowed from the dream sequence in American Beauty. But the wine was not ideal with the fowl or the meat: It had a certain thinness, and retreated like a small wave before the immense beach of all that hearty carnivorous fare.

Needless to say I blame only myself. I ordered the wine. I was the decider, and Aldo and our friend did not object to that: I sometimes think Aldo ought to put up more of a fight in these matters, actually. I watch the endless back-and-forth on the political primary trail and wish wine could be debated along with immigration. Then again, Aldo did cite American Beauty as part of his wine critique, and what does that tell you? At any rate, in the end we all agreed to forgive me and we hugged and cried over our coffee and resolved to go on in the future letting me be the decider anyway. But it can be a tough, challenging road. I don’t envy presidents one bit.

I keep it on my desk, and the first thing you might think if you saw it there was: Why has Billy left a baking potato here? It is brown, and finely pocked on the surface. To this day Aldo says he’s tempted to wrap it in foil and pop it into the oven. But to the touch it is solid and
heatless, and in the palm of your hand it has heft. This is my pudding stone, my galet, that I slipped into the pocket of my coat as a memento of our trip to Provence.

We were heading back to our hotel in Avignon after an afternoon’s drive up and around and around and down Mont Ventoux and in and out of some neighboring towns. This was in mid-March. The day before had been rain-soaked, which made for a rather pleasantly melancholy stroll through the ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps—there’s a Van Gogh painting that captures the romantic moldiness of it all—but today the air had cleared and was crisp and giving way to spring. We had come down off Mont Ventoux, as I say, and were driving through the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape with perhaps only half an hour or so to sundown: The road, the trees, the vineyards, the gentle hills were saturated with long bands of deep yellow light striated by blue shadow.

“Aldo, take a picture!”

I think I may have said this as a command when it should have instead come across as a polite request made urgent by the thrill of the moment. At any rate, Aldo tends to dig in his heels at command-requests, and he answered firmly that there was no point, the light had gone. But here I was in a beautiful stretch of wine country, and even if I remembered it afterward—as I do now—it seemed terrible that I couldn’t hold onto something more
concrete than a memory. I pulled the car to the side of the road, and this time I did command:

“Aldo, go get me one of those pudding stones from the vineyard.”

If you are wondering what a pudding stone is, I will tell you now. The French call it a galet. It’s simply a stone, a rock, an aggrandized pebble with a sense of its worth in the scheme of vinification, that holds down the soil in a vineyard and protects the dirt and the vines. It warms the earth with stored heat from the sun, and shields the earth from the cool of night. No big deal, I guess: a rock. It’s not as if the vineyards were covered with gorgeous glass marbles, or protected by some exotic kind of ferret trained to stretch itself out and wrap its fur around the stems of the vines. Just a rock that’s older than any one of us and deployed by a French winemaker following a tradition that dates back centuries. But it has its role in things, and to be able to claim you have a role in Chateauneuf-du-Pape - well, you are a very significant stone, c’est tout.

And so I told Aldo to go get me a pudding stone, and Aldo once again dug in his heals and informed me that, no, he was not about to steal.

“But it’s just a rock. A small rock.”

“I take the Ten Commandments very seriously. Or at least that one, because it’s morally uncomplicated. Don’t steal stones, don’t steal diamonds, don’t rob banks, don’t rob landscapes. It’s what I believe is called a blanket commandment. You’ll note that isn’t the Commandment the Israelites disobeyed, either. They built a golden calf. They didn’t sneak rocks off French farmland.”

“What about when you fibbed on your expense account?”

“I don’t think I fibbed, and a fib isn’t the same as a theft, and besides I think I sufficiently explained to my office why I needed those carp.”

Aldo would not do my bidding, in short, and I ended up hopping out of the car myself and bounding a few steps into the field. There were rabbits, and they hopped away in a panic, as if aware of a thief in their midst. I picked up one stone, then another, and another before I found one that had the right size—the baking potato.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” said Aldo, looking around as if worried that an alarm might go off and the grapes blink bright red to signal a breach in security. “Allons!”

And that was how the stone came to be in my house, on my desk, and if you mistake it for a potato, I tell you it is Chateauneuf-du-Pape, it is a vineyard, it is Provence: and if you touch it, pick it up, you are part of all that too.

Yes, there is a Wine Museum in Italy. It’s a sort of curatorial outcropping of what the Italians call agriturismo, and it is to be found in a small, clean, neat town in Umbria called Torgiano, which we assume is pronounced with dulcet tenderness as “Tor-jee-an-o,” the syllables seeping out in a trickle, but which one local – responding to our request for directions – pronounces fiercely with a much more economical “tor-jon-o.” He makes it sound like a medieval weapon or torture device.

Torgiano is located not too far to the south of Perugia, where we are staying at the Hotel Brufani. But the traffic circle leading out of Perugia is so cluttered with meaningless signs pointing to obscure towns that I believe it takes us at least six hours to get there. It is, in fact, late in the day when we park in an otherwise empty lot on the edge of the place. The light is a soft pigeony gray that offsets very nicely the simple, dignified war-memorial in an adjacent leafy little park. Torgiano, as I said, is neat, clean and proper, despite its age, although Aldo keeps muttering, “I’m gettin’ them di Chirico creeps.”

“Well,” I ask, “isn’t that better than being back in the States and getting the Andrew Wyeth willies or something?”

Yet Torgiano does have a certain di Chirico stillness to it: the tall tower with the clock tells time even though the place is so empty there seems to be no one to tell time to other than some old men leaning against buildings and a few women with children. They are all waiting for the daylight to end, I suppose. The stillness has a sense, too, of Antonioni and his slow tracking shots across the piazza at nap time.

However, that this is a carefully manicured little community probably has less to do with di Chirico or Antonioni than the influence of the Lungarotti family and their winery outside town. Their business began back in the early ’60s, and now they have a hotel in Torgiano, and a restaurant, and they created and run the museum. There’s also an olive oil museum.

We are the only visitors to the museum: It’s less than an hour to closing, we are told by the woman at the ticket booth. She has tall, complicated blond hair and makes me think of Monica Vitti in a character role.

One traipses in and out of a series of salons that are densely but sensibly organized with everything from the basic equipment that has gone into pressing grapes since before the industrial age onto decorative pieces, and wine labels, and chalices, and cups, and a centuries-old ceramic bust of Pope Clement cradling a bunch of ripe grapes as if he had just been given a kitten. It would be cute if Clement also didn’t look tipsy.

Aldo and I are not bowled over, really, but that probably wouldn’t happen anyway unless the museum galleries led into a shaded courtyard and Monica Vitti reappeared with a pleasant bottle of Lungarotti wine, perhaps the Rubesco, its trademark DOC wine.

We leave Torgiano and drive back toward Perugia. Ancient stone towns, Assisi included, dot the hills, and vistas along the way open up onto grape vines. And yet, despite this gentle lesson in agriturismo, what Aldo and I will most remember is a slight nagging chill — that we somehow stumbled onto a pedestrian tour mapped out by the Edward Hopper of Italy.

Aldo and I, in town for a few days, rent bikes and cycle around all afternoon: quicksilver weather, hot, cool, breezes from the ocean and the trees and the hills. Aldo is unhappy trying to figure out the gears, and the boy does not like going uphill, and then downhill he’s afraid of losing control of the handlebars. We pause in front of the Biltmore in Montecito, and the ocean view could be a Manet: Everyone moving happily in the wind and light, the red and yellow and purple flowers bursting from the green hedges. Then a late lunch – a salad – and a walk out to the end of the Santa Barbara pier.

There’s a clam shack there where Julia Child used to eat – clams, I assume, not shacks — but no commemorative bust or statue of that Sequoia of cuisine. The sun goes in and out of clouds of fog, looking more like a moon than a sun.

By 8:30 we have worked up stupendous appetites worthy of Miss Child herself.

Dinner is at Bouchon on Victoria Street. A restaurant famous for its wine list, focused so intensely on Santa Barbara County vineyards that other West Coast State wines are relegated to a separate sheet of paper, like footnotes to a grand academic thesis. The wait staff talk very knowledgeably about the local wines, and pleasantly too. Our waitress has a Sigourney Weaver angularity and red eyeglass frames that I find mesmerizing. I wonder if what I think are her glittering blue eyes are actually irises painted on the back of her lenses. This is before anything has been drunk, by the way.

I order sauteed mushrooms followed by duck with a rich succotash, and to drink? The 2003 Palmina Nebbiolo. This is a wine so big (over 15 percent) that past the two-third mark on the bottle Aldo comments that he feels as if his head were about to fall off and slide into the Pacific Ocean.

We were told that the wine would benefit from a few minutes opening up, but this proves debatable. The more it opens, the more it becomes jammy, the more every sip competes with every bite of food for attention – fights, really. It’s like a stuffed sofa that has to be shoved out of the way, over and over.

Wine should have flavor, and a nose, and body, and alcohol, and all that, but if it is to be paired successfully with food doesn’t it require a certain transparency? You want to be able to taste “through” the wine to get at that duck, or sauteed mushroom, or Poptart, if you’re that perverse.

So although this Palmina is a conscientious act of construction, balanced and powerful, well… one could say the same thing of the Eiffel Tower.

On the walk back to our hotel along State Street, just a few blocks from Boucheron, a young man with strong tattooed forearms happens to park his bicycle on the corner as we pass. He dips his hand into front pockets filled with white powder – chalk, not cocaine – and proceeds to rappel up the ornate terra-cotta front of a building. Two and a half stories, I’d say. We’re astounded: It’s like a Cirque du Soleil audition.