The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago ran an interesting profile of a man it called “the wine antisnob.” His name is Tim Hanni, and his story is certainly fascinating: A leading wine expert, he has been a recovering alcoholic for more than a decade.

For my purposes, though, the more significant point is not his story but his attitude, this so-called wine antisnobbery.

Let me begin by making the point that I welcome wine antisnobs–I came close just now to saying I love wine antisnobs—because without antisnobbery how can one properly define snobbery? It is something like the old philosopher’s paradox that by denying God you admit that He exists. I believe Tolstoy also said something to the effect that without death we would not be able to define the meaning of life, but I’m not sure I trust Tolstoy on that one. By the end of his life he was a big-bearded scold.

I want to deal with just one aspect of this wine antisnob’s active career. In addition to launching a consulting company, WineQuest, the name of which has a certain Holy Grail aspirationality to it, Hanni has resolved the knottier issues of wine and food pairing with a practical—one might also say radically practical—form of kitchen chemistry: fundamentally this relies on the addition of balancing or neutralizing agents like salt, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese. He even has developed a condiment, Vignon, that is meant to accomplish this with a few shakes of the bottle.

This approach, I have to say, is not one I embrace with any enthusiasm, that I regard coldly. Because my own simple, ringingly concrete solution to a food that does not go with a certain wine is to a) change the food or b) change the wine. But for heaven’s sake don’t herniate a disc trying to bridge the gap. Why bother with détente or glasnost or whatever? Have a glass of water between your bites of food and your sips of wine. Or stick to water altogether while eating the wine-challenging food. That, the Journal notes, is the traditionalist approach, which might also be denoted the Vivosian approach, except that the Journal did not contact me for the article. Instead we have the approach that could be called Hannian. The article notes that you can drink a light wine with steak—did I hear “yuck,” anyone?— by squeezing lemon juice on the steak , salting it, or drizzling it with Bernaise. Well, what if you shouldn’t consume salt or Bernaise? What if your blood pressure and cholesterol level are already elevated up to the height of a scary high ridge and someday your heart might go plummeting over the edge?

Or what if you plain don’t like lemon on your steak? Have you ever offered a cow a lemon? They don’t like lemons, either: You are adding insult to injury squeezing lemon juice into its cooked remains.

Why not go with a heartier, deeper red—the wine that does the job and has done so for centuries?

Now, a little chemistry is not a bad thing at all, not at all—Aldo with great pride can recite something called Avogardro’s number that he learned when he was off in his Austrian boarding school and his father was running around the Continent selling rich ladies fraudulent vitamins derived from monkey parts. He especially likes to reel the number off with company present . No one hears him anyway. He sits there smiling to himself and moving his lips and counting infinite digits on his pudgy ringed hands.

It was Aldo who suggested we test at least one suggestion of Mr. Hanni’s, as reported in the Journal: Asparagus is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to pair with white wine (the artichoke is possibly even worse). It regards wine the way a porcupine does a cat: Gets its spiky back up. With wine, aspargus tastes metallic and, as Aldo once put it, like a marsh grass that has wandered into a French kitchen. And the wine reciprocates, spitefully, by losing its deliciousness. Mr. Hanni’s solution: Lemon juice and salt.

This sounded plausible to me. And, besides, lemon juice gives a wonderful lightening touch to asparaus. Aldo and I poured ourselves a 2006 Inama Soave Classico for this experiment. With plain steamed asparagus, true enough, food and wine were unpleasant – that familiar awfulness blossomed that makes me think of the aroma and taste of water from an old drinking fountain. But Mr. Hanni’s trick worked fairly well: With lemon juice and a little salt, the asparagus maintained its asparagusy flavor in the mouth, as did the wine its light floral and citrus notes. The clash was resolved.

In the end, however, this experiment did not produce actual harmony of wine and vegetable, which means that aesthetically it was a wash. This was not yin and yang – the flavors were not integrated. They merely shook hands across a fence running down the middle of my tongue. They might be called neighborly.

And since I am a wine snob, what is the good of that?

The holidays are approaching, are here in fact, and yet Aldo and I have chosen to spend the night indoors as if there were a howling blizzard outside, and seasonal carolers could only make themselves heard to the rescue dogs by singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from deep inside the drifts in which they are buried. Aldo is already in his robe and reading the letters of Noel Coward, which he finds absorbing, except that he gets tired of them from time to time and will watch a cartoon on YouTube. I take this opportunity to record for the sake of my eager public a few notes on a wine we had recently, Michel Tete’s Domaine du Clos du Fief:

Medium intense ruby core fading to a pink watery rim, which makes me think of a flamingo melting. Medium aromas of cinnamon, tart cherries, musk and soil. I suppose one might ask soil from where? Julienas, France, presumably. On the palate: Dry. High acidity. Medium bodied, which Aldo used to be when he was more religious about aerobic exercise. Medium also as to the alcohol and the tannins. Flavors of cherries, both tart and dried, nutmeg, peat and leather. I remember in particular that Aldo insisted he tasted peat and leather – peat on leather. “There is a difference,” he said. “Some princesses are more discerning about peas than others.” At the finish there comes a little light berry twist.

The wine is balanced. Lean without much concentration or intensity, which I suppose is how I would describe Aldo back in the days when he did exercise religiously. It might be summed up as a slightly more refined and serious beaujolais.

I have a small note here saying that Aldo also described it as “faintly grim,” and I should have asked him in greater detail just what he meant by that. Who drinks a faintly grim wine other than a Puritan or Oliver Cromwell on a feast day? But he’s watching a cartoon at the moment, and I don’t want to distract him until he goes back to his reading.

We were sharing a bottle of the 2004 Domaine Rimbert “Le Mas au Schist” over a nice, simple late-autumn supper of sausages, apples and rice. We had indulged in our usual exercise of wine anaylsis, starting with an observation of the deep purple core, then taking in the dark fruit and dusky perfume on the nose. Yet I noticed that Aldo seemed to be holding back.

I don’t mean just reticent. I mean I thought he was holding back tears.

I asked him what on earth could be troubling him when we were embarked on this tasty St. Chinian wine, and he said – after a certain amount of hemming and hawing that made my compassionate mood rather thinner than it started out to be – that he had been reading online about a famous experiment conducted with a group of wine experts:

They had been given glasses of wine, some red, some white, and asked to describe and identify them. Well, the trick was that the wines were all the same white: some had merely been reddened with vegetable dye. And yet the experts went on to describe the doctored white in classic, even hackneyed terms of red.

To me, this was not news: There have been plenty of tests in which blindfolded experts couldn’t distinguish between a white and a red. But to Aldo, this all raised terrible doubt: He seemed as sad as a child uncertain about Santa, or a saint in a dark night of the soul over the really big questions of God and heaven and so on. I have never had a dark night of the soul, fortunately. My sleep is too important to me, and usually the wine with dinner seals the deal.

I think I would say Aldo’s case was touching, in its display of vulnerability, but also annoying, in that he was entertaining doubts about me.

I know this because he said so. He didn’t say, “How do I know, Billy, that you are as genuinely expert as I have always believed? How am I to firm up my old trust in your abilities, which have, sometimes certainly, verged on genius?” He may have been thinking that, I suppose. But what he said was: “Wouldn’t it be fun, Billy, if I did that with you?”

“Did what?”

“Blindfolded you, say, and had you determine what you were drinking. It would be wine, of course. I wouldn’t try and trick you with soda or grape juice. But it would be fun.”

“What’s fun about that?”

“To see you proved right.”

“If I am going to be proved right, why waste the time? I can see perfectly well what this is about, testing your shakey faith.”

“Don’t be silly, Billy. I was baptized and confirmed and have a real shot at a Knight of Malta garter and certificate, if I write a big enough check.”

“I mean faith in me. I am not going to indulge in some sort of game, Aldo, just because you’re afraid I’m fallible. If anything, I would think you wanted to shield me from anything that might – I don’t want to say expose me, because that implies I have something to hide. And I do not.”

“Well, I do wonder now how much anyone can know. I would try this on Robert Parker, but I’d have to buy a gun and break through his damned security. Doesn’t he live in a mansion compound surrounded by a moat with piranhas and an electric fence with armed guards in turrets?”

“Yes, and why shouldn’t he? The Bordeaux assassins speak fluent English and can bluff their way past anyone. And what would it matter? Does it really matter if a person, tricked into a false position, falls back on preconceptions and memories?”

“I believe it might. Might matter.”

I determined that in future I would not let Aldo open a bottle of wine out of my sight: He knows how to make the sound of a cork popping by plucking his cheek with his finger. Who knows what he might pour me?

This was an awful blow, and I knew we would eventually overcome it, but for now Aldo’s mistrust in me had created just as much if not more mistrust in him. We continued to drink our wine, and eventually enjoyed it, and got a soft buzz from it. But the evening no longer was what it might have been.

In bed, I prayed for the safety of Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and Kermit Lynch, then lay awake for a spell, my head percolating with anxiety. Was this a dark night of the soul? Then I fell asleep, and slept in till ten a.m.

When Aldo asks me what it means to call a wine “haunting,” I assume this is another instance of his endearing childish literalness - this is Halloween season, after all. And so my first instinct is to provide the most childishly literal explanation possible. I tell him of the legendary bottle of Clos d’Escalier that for generations has struck terror in the hearts of the Escalier family of Provence.

It is their vineyard that produces the wine, and it is their family that suffers by it. The story goes that whenever a bottle of the long-depleted 1787 vintage appears unbidden in the dumbwaiter connecting the dining salon to the cellar, someone at dinner that evening will be dead by sunrise, as surely as Poe’s raven croaks, “Never again,” or “Oh no! Nurse!” or whatever. It all has something to do with a curse brought down on the Escaliers by a Madame Defarge-like crone at the time of the French Revolution. I believe the family refused her a 10 percent discount on a case.

This, at any rate, is a wine that could be called “haunting” with absolute accuracy.

“Thank you for that ghost tale,” says Aldo with a noticeable lack of blood-running-cold fear, “but I was referring to this wine review I was reading. The writer refers to a riesling spatlese as possessing, and I quote, a haunting beauty. I’m trying to think what that would be — a wine that haunts, let alone a wine that haunts beautifully.”

“Ah!

“What?”

“You’ve hit on a favorite topic of mine, the overreaching wine writer. I take it you never have had a quote-unquote haunting wine?”

“No.”

“And that would be correct, because the fact of the matter is that wine is not haunting, does not haunt. The only person it haunts is a wine writer overreaching for effect. I think we can agree that a wine might be memorable?”

“Yes.”

“Or even unforgettable?”

“Possibly.”

“But to say something haunts — that usually is underlined by a thin frisson of something disturbing, or negative. Much the way an image of a skull might haunt a person as a memento mori.”

“You mean a reminder of death.”

“Well, certainly not a reminder of lunch, Aldo.”

“Cheap sarcasm wounds deeply, Mr. Vivos. You know that.”

“Sorry. At any rate, a man could be haunted by the memory of slapping his mistress -”

“Now that’s an odd example -”

“Or by the memory, say, of killing her by conking her on the head with a bottle of wine and then disposing of the body before his wife finds out —”

“What is this, Desperate Housewives?”

“What I’m getting at is that wine writing tends to be imprecise to begin with. And when left in the hands of a writerly soul who may already be poetic and is made even more so by the ingestion of half a bottle - the phrasing melts into gush and then slush. I have had thousands of wines in my adult life, and I have not been haunted by any of them. Just like you. And neither us is any the poorer for it. We don’t need to be haunted by a wine, or thrown into the ecstasies of St. Teresa of Avila.”

“All we need is the corkscrew –.”

“That’s correct, Aldo.”

“– Which releases the spirits in the bottle. I wonder if that means a writer could describe a bottle in terms of Linda Blair.”

“Head-turning.”

“Levitating.”

Then Aldo does his impression of Linda Blair swearing at Ellen Burstyn, and the conversation ends.

Sometimes Billy wants to indulge in what might be called a revery of vinous memory. That’s a terrible turn of phrase, “revery of vinous memory,” but that’s what this is. And I am thinking just now of must, the raw juice of the harvested and crushed grape. Pagans probably thought it was blood and went berserk, foaming purple bubbles at the mouth. Civilization in time taught them the lovely, more understated truth.

I can still remember the unexpected joy and satisfaction that came to me when I inhaled the dense odor of grape must on my first visit with a tour group to a winery. I noted it in my diary, which I quote here: “Grape must — a defining moment! Also, very hot photo of John Travolta on cover of Paris Match.” I was even more keenly impressionable because, of course, at the time I was much younger and all new sensations stirred me deeply. I am willing to date myself a little by admitting that it had not been so long before this visit that I was capable of being moved to tears, for instance, by Laura’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago, and fought terribly with my poor parents because I wanted them to hire balalaika players for my seventeenth birthday party. I also wanted someone to be positioned on the roof to shake down confetti snow. What’s wrong with playing a record by the Carpenters, my mother asked. And that was what we went with. We’ve only just begun… “To barf,” I said to myself.

But to return to that afternoon in the winery and that smell of grape must…

As our little tour group moved inside the winery’s compound, the scent that greeted me hit me with such pleasurable force that I wondered if some atavistic genetic memory were being triggered. Had one of my ancestors harvested grapes and stomped them underfoot? Had I in a previous incarnation been a vine of merlot? The odor of must is, in its way, as overpowering as gasoline – or musk, or whatever it is that animals secrete that makes them go all sexually nutty in season. The raw juice smells of the grape itself, yes, and damp, earth, and cool darkness and chalky air – it is the cave distilled into cologne and sprayed over the winery like Bacchus’s own blessing.

That day I could smell the ancient process of the extraction of juice from grape and soil. And this is the great thing about wine, isn’t it? Its time line into the distant past, and the fact that we experience what was experienced then. I mean, you can love Sinatra, but I don’t think Come Fly With Me connects you to imperial Rome.

But must has an unsettling quality to it, as well. If it connects us to past lives, well, those lives are kaput – there is something of the grave as well as the cave. That first day, even in my woozy happiness, it also smelled like my grandmother’s basement, where over the years she developed a bad habit of stashing her Christmas poinsettas. They remained there and withered and dried until she herself died: When we went through the house to clear out her possessions, the basement looked like the secret cache of a floral serial killer.

This isn’t, I agree, quite the same thing as Proust nibbling the madeleine. I don’t like madeleines, for one thing, and I never got past the first 40 pages of Proust. What can I say? If I need an immense masterpiece to dip into again and again, it would be the one by Jackie Susann. It so totally belongs in the canon!

But what I am getting at is my problem with must: It is beyond seductive. It paralyzes the olfactory nerve so that no other scent can really make a serious dent in your nasal passages or even your memory for hours. When I visit a winery, the must follows me home, sticks to my skin and nostrils and clothes as though it were cigarette smoke. Imagine how your eyes would feel if you watched a big-screen 3D print of an epic like Mondo Vino wearing those cheap novelty glasses. I could be biting into a clove of garlic and still the trace memory of must would seize me, instantly transporting me back to that great recollection of the winery, but also to that sepulchral reminder of my grandmother’s dead plants in her dusty basement: not just the plants, let me add, but laundry, and old cardboard boxes, and rusty tricycles that probably had been assembled before Sputnik went up.

I wonder if my grandmother smelled like that herself. Was her housedress washed in grape must? Did she dust her hair with some sort of dried grape-must talcum? She was a good woman, my grandmother, but her presence in the persistence of grape is troubling to me. She could be a bit creepy, actually.

Luckily, she’s undetectable in the nose of this delicious vino da tavola I have just poured: Just chocolate and tobacco and a soft yet pungent spice. It’s Jackie Susann, and she’s always welcome.