Last night our dinner guests left relatively early—they have these things called “children,” and apparently you have to get home to them—so Aldo and I decided to pop one of our favorite Hitchcock movies into the DVD player. It was Notorious—you know, the one about the 1934 Pommard.

Many people, I suppose, may think of this 1946 classic as the one with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant or, more significantly, a beautifully sustained thriller of intrigue and lush sadomasochistic romanticism: Bergman and Grant play a spy and her handler. They become lovers (how could they not?) but nonetheless spend most of the movie lurching between extremes of rapture and disdain even as they try to bring down a house of Nazi scientific schemers presided over by Claude Rains—who in turn loves Bergman with a deluded, puppyish ardor that ultimately is more touching than Grant’s brusque, manly conquest.

But Hitchcock, with his supremely suave cinematic style and fundamental cruel perversity, is a complex director, and his best movies can be appreciated from a number of perspectives. Which is why we think of Notorious as the one about the 1934 Pommard.

The Pommard, in fact, is only the most significant bottle in a movie awash in alcohol. Hitchcock (who was a lover of wine) took meticulous care in plotting out his thrillers, springloading the narrative with details that would trigger suspense while also swiftly establishing the psychology of his characters. Notorious begins with Bergman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, behaving very badly, getting stinking drunk on hootch at a party in Miami while flirting with Grant, an uninvited guest.

Aldo and I always feel badly for Bergman in this scene—Hitchcock women who hit the sauce don’t often end well. (Remember the naughty lady with the spectacles in Strangers on a Train?) Recruited by Grant, Bergman flies with him down to Rio, where she cuts back on the liquor and falls for him even before getting all the details of her assignment.

As he goes off to headquarters to learn those very details, she tells him to bring back a nice bottle of wine for dinner. Needless to say, Aldo and I feel our pulses start to quicken at that instant.

What can wine signify but class and genteel, fade-to-black sex? It’s a stepup all around! Mr. Grant does better: He buys a bottle of champagne. In Hitchcock, champagne is what you get for the gorgeous high-society ice sculptures like Grace Kelly. But Grant forgets the bottle at headquarters when he learns, to his shock and disgust, that Bergman’s task is to fling herself back in the moral sewer by seducing Rains.

Ingrid is such a pro at the espionage game, she quickly goes beyond the call of duty. She becomes Mrs. Rains, which means that while she spies on him, she gets to run his large household and open all the closets for inspection—except for the wine cellar. Claude Baby won’t hand that key over. This is, for Aldo and me, a spiking moment of intense curiosity and excitement: We feel like two Mrs. Bluebeards wanting to get behind that bolted door. And Claude Rains wasn’t exactly Andy Devine: you know his stuff will be top-drawer.

We would have ordered the servants immediately to cut down a large tree from a corner of the garden and fashion it into a battering ram. Ingrid, however, must use greater spylike craft.

She throws a fabulous society party at which the best champagne is served—we know the champagne is good because, in Hollywood’s subtle telegraphic style, the words “Top Quality” are stamped on the foil. Bottle after bottle is opened and consumed—how excited Aldo and I are to see a party where the host doesn’t stint on champagne! Should we be having champagne ourselves? No, because the plot is sweeping us along—While the well-heeled guests are guzzling champagne upstairs, Bergman and Grant explore Rains’ wine cellar, where they suspect he and the Nazis have been hiding a secret project: What they find is a row of Pommards from a famous vintage, 1934. And look—the label! In closeup! Aldo and I couldn’t be dizzier if we were Kim Novak going off the belltower in Vertigo. When Grant accidentally knocks a bottle to the floor, it shatters—and we scream as if it were the shower scene in Psycho.

At this point, to be honest, Hitchcock lets us down a little: The glass splinters into shards, but no wine flows. The bottle—and presumably the other bottles in the row—was filled with a mineral ore the Nazis intend to use to make dangerous new bombs. Well, fine, now we know the real stakes behind the story—but where did all the Pommard go? Was it just wasted, dumped down the drain? Did Rains drink it alone in the tub or on one of his prize horses? Did his Nazi comrades have it served at one of their ironically elegant dinner parties at which they plot assassinations? Or did Claude Rains’ mother, a German dragonlady, buy the bottles as empties somewhere?

Hitchcock never answers these salient questions.

Instead, Rains and his mother start dosing Bergman’s coffee with a slow-acting poison. This is, for us, a stunning plot twist—and the point at which we always stop watching. I mean, Grant somehow rescues Bergman, doesn’t he? It’s just that we aren’t an audience who will sit there biting our nails over toxic caffeine. If we wanted high drama from coffee beans, we would have watched Out of Africa.

It seems a pity, really, that Bergman and Cary Grant didn’t get to enjoy the Pommard by themselves.

In tribute to vigneron Didier Dagueneau, who recently died at only age 52, we decided we would have a bottle of his 2005 Blanc Fume de Pouilly—at $74, the lower end of his internationally acclaimed line.

Once upon a time, we would have been silly enough to think 52 years represented a long life. We are aware now that this is not so. We are now aware that many, many lifetimes pass while a terroir acquires its character and definition. We are Big Picture guys, Aldo and me.

And so we allowed ourselves to enjoy this man’s wine—what finer memorial can a winemaker receive?

Aldo did the uncorking an hour or so before we were to begin drinking—he likes to do the uncorking, it gives him a gratifying sense of utility and ritual—and in the interim he finished preparing a dinner designed not to compete with the flavors we anticipated in the glass. We would be having broiled striped bass, rice and a rather solemn clump of stewed greens from the farmers’ market. It sounds a little like what the villagers ate in Babette’s Feast before Babette showed up with the transfigurative glories of French cuisine. But it was apt.

Meanwhile, I was at the computer googling to learn more about the fragment of musical scoring printed on the Dagueneau label—most likely a riff on a song by French composer-singer Georges Brassens: The miracle of YouTube brought up a string of video clips of Monsieur Brassens, singing in what to my ears was a very French voice—smooth, unforced, folksy with a light sophistication. I found myself wondering aloud if there were ever a French equivalent to as stolid an American pop star as Andy Williams or Glenn Campbell.

But he is dead, too, Monsieur Brassens. And what greater memorial can a composer-singer receive than to have new listeners who, if they hadn’t picked a particular wine, might never have known he existed?

Aldo wondered aloud whether Dagueneau —who was vigorously hirsute with an unkempt beard and (in some photos) dreadlocks—looked more like Jim Henson of the Muppets or Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. (But, again, they too are dead.) The point was not meant with any disrespect—if anything, Aldo was simply acknowledging Dagueneau’s forceful iconoclastic presence in the world of wine. Of course, it will be some time until after the November elections that anyone is comfortable throwing around the word “maverick,” but he was: a biodynamic pioneer who ruthlessly curtailed yields to create wines typically described as luscious, structured, powerful, brilliant, unforgettable, on and on—a plethora of great, manly adjectives.

And the wine, yes, was all that. This sauvignon blanc nonpareil had a pale straw color flecked by hints of green. There was a strong aroma reminiscent of stone, chalk and apple. The palate had a taut but concentrated structure. A rich, acid backbone carried the lime, grapefruit and stone flavors, leading to a lingering finish, slightly cut short due to its youth. An austere wine, a delicious wine, an elegantly focused wine.

We ate the fish, finished the bottle, called it a night and were grateful that we have more bottles of Dagueneau in storage. Life goes on, and wine with it.

Thank, or blame, Sideways. That critically acclaimed film, which I remember chiefly for the nutty surprise of Virginia Madsen’s poetic disquisition on pinot noir, proved that wine lovers are a legitimate, if small, fragment of a target audience. When I say “fragment,” I mean that we can expect to see mostly independent/small-studio movies, and not too many of them, on similar themes. Francis Ford Coppola, even with his love of the vineyard, is probably not going to stir himself to create a Grapefather trilogy.

Yet Bottle Shock is, surprisingly, only the first of two projected movies on the same topic: The celebrated 1976 “Judgment of Paris,” at which a panel of French wine critics preferred California to French wines in a blind tasting of both chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Disappointingly, Shock turns out to be not so much about the actual tasting as about the triumph of the California winery that provided the winning white. This is a comedic saga of grit and hope, fairly loose with the actual details of history, and spiked with several large dramatic chunks as well as clunky attempts at last-minute suspense. A word often used to describe a wine of elegance and harmony is “finesse.” Bottle Shock has no finesse.

Bill Pullman plays Jim Barrett,  the head of Chateau Montalena. And Alan Rickman is Steven Spurrier, the British oeniphile who organized the tasting and picked a Montalena chardonnay for the event. Rickman arrives in sunny California and, with the droll snobbery of fat old Robert Morley, moseys and noses around the area, sampling (and liking) what he finds. He also tastes guacamole, a moment that Rickman turns into a nice little moment: He licks at it like a turtle unsure of a lettuce leaf. Pullman plays Barrett as a man in a permanent wince of emotional pain: As the tasting nears, he thinks (wrongly) that his vintage is bad, despairs that the whole winery is a tragic waste, and berates (and boxes!) his easygoing son (Chris Pine), who looks like an Armani model playing one of the Altman brothers. Pullman is a realistic actor, and he makes much of the Barrett family side of the story play out with the crabbed misery of a John Steinbeck novel. Actually, he’s even more unpleasant than Paul Giamatti was in Sideways. And that’s saying something.

Bottle Shock is more about a victory of character than a victory of wine.

I’ve previously mentioned that Aldo and I visited Portland in midsummer, but it’s only now as the East Coast leaves begin to yellow that I have the chance to write about our remarkable dinner at Beast.

Let me start by saying that earlier in the afternoon of that day—a beautiful day—we were driving our rental car along the Columbia River Gorge when a feral cat darted across in front of us, practically sacrificing its life beneath our wheels, and for what? To pounce on and sink its teeth into the thin meat of of a hapless squirrel that sat in the sunshine in a clearing on the far side of the road.

Anyone who has dined at Beast will pounce instinctively, like that feral cat, at a chance to eat there again. Even if it means dodging traffic. And the meat is plentiful.

It says as much in the name, Beast, which suggests strictly carnivorous fare from the stockyards of Chicago. Or perhaps a refectory for Notre Dame linemen the night before the big game. Or, more in keeping with our own lifestyle, a sex club modeled on the labyrinth of the minotaur. Doesn’t that sound like a delight? It is no place for the vegan. It is, however, a destination for anyone who wants to savor a carefully constructed piece of culinary performance art, exquisite and yet also robust.

The restaurant is located in a nondescript neighborhood, off an intersection containing other plain-wrapped restaurants. A few houses away we passed a lawn where a broken stove had been plunked down without ceremony, like an old relative, with a sign saying it could be had for fifty bucks. Beast itself had a look just one step up from a garage, with a front door protected by metal bars. In New York, it would suggest a perfect Mafia front. Or an Italian restaurant for a Mafia front.

Inside, the restaurant was a dark open room with a slate-black-tiled open kitchen. The back wall also had the look of slate, and was scribbled all over with catchphrases in chalk. I should have written the catchphrases down, because now I can’t recall them except to say they were somewhere between MFK Fisher and Bob Dylan. There were but two tables, arranged perpendicularly, and the staff took a few minutes to manage the somewhat tricky business of optimizing the seating plan.

Aldo said it all reminded him of a) the workhouse dining-hall scene in “Oliver Twist” and b) the restaurant in that scary Peter Greenaway movie “The Cook, the Thief, the Wife & Her Lover.” Neither of those, frankly, are the happiest associations one might have before embarking on a five- or six-course prix-fix meal with wines, but he had a point: The air of being part of an “experience” created a sense of heightened anticipation and hunger—with, besides, the shadow fear of a coming letdown.

And then what should be the amuse bouche but a small bowl of steaming gruel topped with crème fraiche and diced chives?

Kidding! On the contrary, the meal built superbly, happily, from one course to the next. A lobster bisque with sweet yellow corn and—wonderful touch of texture and sweetness—cantaloupe; a charcuterie plate that contained a small, absolutely perfect “bonbon” of foie gras with sauternes gelee, no bigger than a thimble, sitting on a demure little cracker; a sizeable lamb-loin chop that, if served in a Manhattan tasting menu, would have been carved up to serve eight portions; a seared scallop with heirloom tomatoes—the one course, I have to say, that has left no lasting impression on me, except that it was served with a nasturtium remoulade, which is a pretty-sounding phrase; and an exceptionally fine, exceptionally balanced plate of artisan cheeses.

We didn’t have dessert. We’re gays.

A note on the wines. They were thoughtfully chosen to complement the courses, and perfectly suited to midsummer dining. This is not a restaurant showcasing the prevalent taste for the native Willamette grape. The wines were Old World and mostly French, especially from Marsannay. This appellation, known mostly for its roses, produces no sought-after grand crus; mostly light, medium-bodied and agreeable wines. All the bottles, save for the sweet Bordeaux for dessert, were from the 2005 vintage. The Dom. Roy Marsannay blanc “Les Champs Perdrix,” a wine from a significant parcel (or lieu-dit) west of the Route de Grand Cru that runs along the village of Marsannay, presented a racy, Chablis-like counterpoint to the creamy lobster bisque. The Dom. Fougeray du Beauclair rose matched perfectly with the charcuterie plate. Even the foie gras bonbon contrasted nicely with the rose’s fruitiness. This same domain’s St Jacques blanc did not overwhelm the scallop; if anything, they joined together to sing a mellow low-key note. Best of all, the polished Fred Loimer Langenlois Terrassen Pinot Noir made an elegant Austrian match with the lamb loin-chop. For dessert, the guest was offered a Loupiac or Maury, depending on his preference for cheese or chocolate.

Beast probably would be a bust in Manhattan, where people wouldn’t be expected to seek out unusual culinary experiences in odd residential neighborhoods in unprepossessing little shacks. Nor would they line up outside before being seated, as we did, unless it were for a highly praised, hard-to-get off-off-Broadway show. And the economics of big-city dining would pose problems for a multi-course menu (no subsitutions) served in generous portions in a small room, two seatings per night. But in Portland it works, beautifully. This was practically the best meal we’d had all year.

This reissue of three slim Kingsley Amis books from the publisher Bloomsbury isn’t strictly speaking a great boon to wine drinkers. Its chief value, apart from terrifically sharp humor and compulsive readability, is how it affords a glimpse into the mind of someone who loves booze of any and every kind.

Wine, for Amis, is merely one more character in an alcoholic narrative full of mixed drinks, liquors, liqueurs and ales. In terms of the liveliness and scope of the book’s catalog of drinks, Everyday Drinking is almost Dickensian. It is instructive, if you are a wine-lover with romantic feelings about structure, viniculture and the like—I myself am especially fond of rhapsodizing how a wine’s color captures and toys with the light—to remember that there are many people who consider such things pretentious and time wasting. Amis knows wine and its rituals well, but they are certainly not something he writes about with any enthusiasm:

Hit your wine merchant across the mouth when, innocently trying to put you on to a good thing, or what he sees as one, he recommends you to “buy for laying down.”

Whatever the men in the know may say, a German wine label is a fearful thing to decipher.

Drink any wine you like with any dish…. The North of England couple I once read about who shared a half-bottle of crème de menthe (I hope it was a half-bottle) to go with their grilled turbot should be inspiration, if not a literal example, to us all.

It is good, wine enthusiast, to realize that this mindset isn’t rare.

The book is at its most fun in chapters on hangover, how to entertain guests while keeping the lion’s share of good booze for yourself (“Mean Sod’s Guide,” it’s called, with a separate entry for the wife, “Mean Slag’s Guide.”), and many recipes on awful-sounding punches and cocktails. Queen Victoria’s Tipple, anyone?

I would add that Amis, for all his humor and apparently prodigious drinking, is not someone who pretends to be a bon vivant, either: He is someone who knows what he is talking about, but I always feel he is speaking from an old leather club chair in a cloud of unfiltered cigarette smoke intermingled with some smoggy ecological mist of black and white and gray. I think he is fundamentally grim, in a post-empire, hungover sort of way. Maybe the hangover was literal. The book is highly recommended, anyway, as something to sip from, learn from and laugh at out loud.