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.

When I dine alone, as I am tonight and did for several weeks recently when I was on the road in the northeast attending the annual antique wine-coaster shows, I still dine well. But there is something lonely about it. I don’t mean that Aldo stays behind in New York: he’s never in the right spirit when I’m trying to determine the true provenance of a wine coaster, a process of deduction that can take hours, even days. No, I miss the sight of a full 750 ml bottle of wine on my dinner table. Instead I share my meal with a half-bottle: It sits there, with the tinier proportions of its bottle, and it always makes me think of a puppy that wants to be taken for a walk. Or a hobbit that can only speak in a squeak, instead of the confident boom of a Gandolf.

There is no romance in the half-bottle. What there is is less alcohol, so that I don’t leave the restaurant swinging out through imagined saloon doors singing ribald songs that I don’t feel in my heart. Frankly, wine bought by the glass has more appeal, at least visually: You can imagine the larger bottle from whence it was spawned. But I can never be sure how fresh wine is by the glass: Watching the bartender pull the cork out of an already opened, half-empty bottle disturbs my spirit, and that is no way to have a good dinner.

And so, once again, the half-bottle it is tonight with my lovely meal at Hugo’s in Portland, Maine. There is summer corn bisque topped with apple smoked bacon, avocado fritter and oregano. Then on to two rabbit stuffed quail sausages, sweet and chewy, with a little braised apple and a roasted baby onion. Next comes a Chanterelle mushroom meatloaf in truffle foam with corn milk grits and green beans tempura. All ended with a chocolate malted Semifreddo. The flavors of this dinner are intense and sensual. No doubt this meal demands a statuesque bottle. Alas. With each serving I stare and pour from my mini-me half-bottle a light and supple 2001 Chateau Brillette Cru Bourgeoise from Moulis en Medoc. “Hello little Gidget!” “Not too much, Tom Thumb!” The half-bottle empties so quickly, doesn’t it? Like the grains in the hourglass, but much faster. I would never go on to a second half-bottle (see above: bawdy songs). Imagine the clutter, like milk bottles left out for the trash. That means, then, that I must monitor its depletion with great care. I wish I had an eyedropper to extract it from the bottle and squirt it into my glass. But what eyedropper has that sort of depth of reach?

I go on like this because I know wine lovers will feel my pain.

“When did salmon become so expensive,” I ask Aldo as I serve dinner.
“I think it’s another of those things related to global warming,” he says. “The sea cooks them before they can be caught. The fishers bring up nets full of baked and broiled fish.”
“Well,” I say, setting the platter on the table, “I had to sell some of my cufflinks to pay for this – it’s the Alaskan wild stuff. I had a cash problem, as happens, and when you look through your things for things to sell, it can be a real challenge – settling on something that offers just enough liquidity.”
“I feel so special.”
“And you are, Aldo.”
“Which cufflinks?”
“Vintage, platinum, somewhat bejeweled.”
“Those sound suspiciously like ones I gave you… It was Halloween, and I was feeling impish.”
“I was able to just get the salmon, the wax beans, the tarragon, the dessert. The few nickels left over will buy the morning paper.”
“The Times or the Journal?”
“The Post. They’re the only ones who really tell me what I need to know about Leona Helmsley’s dog.”
“Did you buy the wine tonight too?”
“Oh no, that was in the cellar.”
“You don’t have a cellar.”
“The wine refrigerator. I speak with an embracing fancifulness.”
“Yes,” said Aldo, fingering his wine glass, “you do.”
He said this with something less than indulgence. I decided, with dinner awaiting us, it was time to turn to the wine. The 2005 Macon Cruzille, “Magante,” from Alain and Julien Guillot. A full-flavored pinot noir, easy drinking with a happy little dash of pizazz. Ah: the refreshing little swim of wine on the tongue…
“I taste dried red cherries, eucalyptus, tobacco – any thoughts, Aldo?”
“You could have sold me back the cufflinks. Or I could have sold something of my own. That umbrella stand that belonged, allegedly, to a post-Impressionist.”
“Then you would have been paying for dinner, and what sort of host would I be?”
“I never understand why you have these so-called cash problems,” he said, swilling the wine in his mouth and nodding tacit agreement with my assessment of the wine. “Harmonious. Dry with a sweet undertone. Almost cola.”
“That doesn’t sound right, Aldo. Not cola…”
“We’ll leave it at sweet undertone, then.”
“And if you really want cufflinks, Aldo, I have those ones from Barneys, the little sapphire bursts…”
“Oh, from Barneys two owners ago.”
“You have such a memory, Aldo!”
“Yes, and I didn’t like them much. Why don’t we eat?”

Bad things happen to good people and bad and thoughtless people in particular, as well as to people who drink wine.

I am going to tell you about an incident that will shock, perhaps terrify wine lovers. Even now, as I write these words, I shudder. In fact, I am going to pour myself a very nice little glass of this Italian vermouth, Carpano Antica Formula, which has a beautiful dark-beer brownness to it and quite a lot of kick.

All right. Now:

I was running late at some event or other, and I phoned home and told Aldo to go ahead and open the wine we would be having for a quick dinner — to let it breathe and so on before we would taste it. Aldo, who I will tell you right now is a wonderful and well-meaning human being whose only conscious cruelty has been directed to insects, and even then only certain insects, said yes of course no problem. He said this in such a way (yes of course no problem) that made me wonder whether he really was minding what I was saying. What I was saying was that the ordinary Trimbach riesling already had been moved from the wine refrigerator into the regular refrigerator (I would rather have Aldo thumb through my cache of pornographic postcards than look through my wine refrigerator). All he was to do was walk to the regular refrigerator, open the door, remove the Trimbach, open the corksrew, insert said corkscrew into aforementioned bottle of wine, and leave it on a coaster to breathe in the evening air, as might a prisoner gratefully exposed to fresh oxygen filling his lungs.

Yes of course no problem.

And yet what did my befogged Aldo do but drift in a zombie-like state of indifference or carelessness to the wine refrigerator, search through the racks until he found something, anything, that said Trimach, uncork it, leave it breathing on the coaster and turn on the television, where he took his usual perverse delight in watching Ann Coulter tossing her blonde mane and throwing out verbal bombs on a news cast. Aldo in his quietly sick way is drawn to lanky, stressful women.

I walked in the door with the insouciant cheer of old Robert Young – yes, I am dating myself here, but I’ll be crucified with the two thieves if I say, I don’t know, Kelsey Grammar – and I said: “Aldo, turn off Ann Coulter and let’s taste the wine.”

Yes of course no problem.

Unfortunately Aldo – and I think here I will call him “my poor little Aldo” – had opened a bottle of a 2000 Trimbach Vendage Tardive I had been storing.

Aldo had made a terrible mistake. Aldo had rocked my world, and not in a good way.

This was an expensive bottle I recently acquired from a midtown wine shop, and I had spent many happy minutes, if not hours, anticipating the day some time since when the wine would have aged even further and Aldo would uncork it and we would have tasted it and analyzed it and lost ourselves in the aromatic wreath of its nose and let its lovely liquid loll across our palates.

Instead we have it before us now to go with a mundane plate of bluefish and farro salad. And I don’t like bluefish. And I don’t know really what farro salad is.

Much recrimination and sorrow and terror, back and forth, a volley of vituperative comments. Aldo’s carelessness versus my highhandedness… a reminder of what I had done when we vacationed in the Bahamas – a very minor indiscretion, which should be judged no worse than a traffic ticket or a parking meter left unattended … and, of course, once Aldo throws the Bahamas incident at me I can’t help at that point faulting Aldo for wasting his family money on a racehorse that was kept mysteriously tethered to a palm tree in Brazil and then died under suspicious circumstances. I walk up and down the length of the apartment, wringing my hands and shaking my head. Aldo stands stockstill, brooding by the window.

But we know each other well, Aldo and I, and after a while the air thaws and we move, however sullenly, to taste the wine. It has a pale straw core that fades to a watery rim. Aldo and I detect medium notes of petrol, flowers, lime and musk. Already the wine is beginning to develop. With 24 grams of sugar, it’s surprisingly just off-dry. The acidity is fairly high, which bodes well for its future – or would have boded well, if Aldo had paid attention. We both find a well-defined but moderate reprise of the nose with additional flavors of pear, melon, honey and especially citrus. Nice long length.

In short, if this were a Hollywood film, the excitement of the wine would overcome any residual sourness in either of our temperaments. The lights would brighten, conversation quicken, happiness come uncorked like a genie.

But I write to you from life, and the truth is that nothing can quite make this wine the one we wanted. It has been brought into the world under the wrong circumstances. It ought to be a butterfly. Instead it is more along the lines of a moth or, worse, a mayfly. It flutters, or tries to, then its life is over.

Never go to bed angry, is the old saying. To this we add never open a bottle of wine angry, either. Wine is an elixir. It is not a cure all.