We spent a week in Portland, Oregon, a place of gorgeous pines and mountains—a landscape dramatic but also strangely soothing—with a strong and expertly brewed brand of coffee called Stumptown and with many bearded men dressed in slightly avant-garde clothing (the style falls somewhere between punk rock and logging camp). Residents we spoke with tended to sigh after Seattle as a more cosmopolitan town, and although our weather was superb they often alluded darkly to winter rains and oppressive cloud cover that made them suffer. But then who doesn’t think of happiness as something to be found elsewhere? We spend at least two minutes of any given day in Manhattan, the bustling center of the world, lamenting the fact that we’re there.

We had wine, too, abundantly and integrally linked to the economy and the life of the area. One lightly cool evening, we met a man who planted grapes out in the vineyards of Dundee Hills, and with him was a French girl who had been spending the summer as a vineyard intern. Somewhere in there is the story for a charming indie movie. Back in Manhattan, the only winemaker we know rents fermenting steel tanks out on Long Island: This seems to us to lack the same romance of the earth. On the other hand, this winemaker is destined to make money, and it’s amazing how much romance you can generate just by sprinkling in a dollar sign and some zeroes.

We were staying with a friend who, in a pleasantly dogged way, has managed to acquire several thousand bottles of Oregon wines, mostly reds, in the basement of his home. He was very generous with his wines—our first concern had been that he was hoarding for a postapocalyptic bomb cellar—and constantly reappeared with another bottle to open for us. We got a little woozy, to be honest. Or it may have been that we relaxed into the Pacific Northwest lifestyle. Our friend had planted bamboo along his patio, and we seemed to sway with the reeds.

What do we recall? A 1997 Argyle sparkling blanc de blanc from the Knudsen vineyards; a 1999 Argyle brut made from 30 percent pinor noir and 70 percent chardonnay—both crisp and pleasurable. Also two Panther Creeks, a 1999 pinot noir from the Bednarik vineyards and a 2000 pinot noit from the Red Hills Estate. Generally these were lovely wines, perhaps lacking in nuance. And the sparkling wines may have had the edge with us. But at the same time the pinots were lower-keyed than what we expect in wines from, oh, Californee. These weren’t overextracted blockbuster fruit bombs. They were of a piece with the hills saturated with blue and greens: Plush but without ostentation.

An importer of considerable influence and impeccable taste, Rosenthal is at his finest in this memoir when conjuring up the experience of sampling a new wine. Consider this long passage:

At its best, wine captures and transmits all of the elements of the ambience from which it is born. In the ’61 Chambave, one could smell the skin of the hares that scamper through the vineyards and the gentian and the juniper that fill the surrounding fields; the taste captured the myriad berries, black and red and blue, that grow in abundance on the mountainside; and, lingering in the background, in the aroma, as a supplemental flavor, and in the texture of the tannins, is the stern minerality of the slate-infused soil. We drank and we ate, and now, twenty-seven years later, every second of that experience is with me.

That’s a lovely marriage of romantic pictorialism—those scampering hares, that juniper in the fields—to a sensible, undergirding appreciation of the earth chemistry at work in the wine. It captures the small, happy miracle of wine. The book is less successful at bringing to life the vignerons he has cultivated in developing his renowned business (something doesn’t register—the mix of concrete detail and poetic feeling is off). His prose, when not on the specific topic of wine memories, can get lofty and magisterial and stiff. Wine, he writes near the start, “has invaded my thoughts much as a benign bacterium settles into milk to create pungent cheese.” If he had made his career as a dairy farmer, would he invoke Bordeaux to discuss his love of cheddar? Luckily, at any rate, his sensibility has been for wine.

We spent an afternoon wandering around Charleston in a sort of dazed
contentment: A strong spring gale raced through the tree-lined streets
like a child running ahead of its parent, and the lengthened hours of
light (now daylight savings time) gave us an opportunity to pause and
look at many of the town’s fine, quietly proud houses. Like all good New
Yorker, we speculated about how much property went for, and much Charleston
house could be bought with Manhattan co-op.

We left Charleston about 4 in the afternoon. We had plans for the evening — Dinner
and a sleepover at a top-rated hotel not too far off: Woodlands Resort and Inn,
in the town of Summerville.

Woodlands, built some two decades or so after the Gilded Age, is the former
winter home of a rich Pennsylvania railroad man, and it felt suitably deluxe and
relaxedly clubby. Our room was decorated with an eye to a certain type of detail:
comfortable, slightly more masculine than feminine, as if designed for a respected
middle-aged literary novelist with better than middling sales under his belt. And
the bed was enormous, rising up and up like the steps of an Aztec temple. Outside,
the property was leafy and for the most part deserted, which poetically speaking is
how a property should seem at sunset as the spring air chills. We walked to the
outdoor pool, and it all felt a bit like a small Southern Garden of the Finzi Continis.

But the chief draw to this place had been the hotel’s dining establishment, and we
arrived famished. There was a small bowl of M&Ms in the room, and Aldo wolfed them
down like Patty Duke swallowing pills in Valley of the Dolls. Meanwhile,
I reviewed the large wine list on-line to move the dinner along. The list was varied
with wines reasonably priced and not so. Within a half-hour, I settled on a couple of
interesting whites and reds.

The restaurant is presided over by a young chef named Tarver King, a name that
sounds like a character out of a Robert Penn Warren novel. He has a very impressive
resume that included a stint at the Inn at Little Washington. (We ate there many
years ago, by the way. It was scrumptious and only slightly more expensive than the
budget to build the Chicago World Exposition of 1893.) Chef Tarver’s food was of the
“dazzling” sort that’s probably necessary to get your name on the map outside a
big city. It was probably also unavoidable that the woman who waited on us, while
friendly and pleasurable, would smilingly, insistently ask us how we liked the food.
(The implied answer: Bowled over, toots!) We were given an amuse bouche on a
spoon that produced a flavor and texture approximating blueberry soda, which is not
really all that much of an amusement, but the food that came after was very, very
good—if a bit too thought out. An endive salad, for instance, was a painstaking
construction, its leaves carefully planked end to end almost like a galley ship. We
looked closely to see if tiny slaves were rowing it.

That, actually, was the only objection either of us had to the food: The composition
and colors weren’t very attractive, and the light of the day in pretty Charleston
had made us receptive to pretty food on a pretty plate. I don’t say it wasn’t
delicious – loved the foie gras — only that it didn’t seduce the eye.

With this we were drank a bottle of the 2004 Ostertag Pinot Blanc. Not among
my immediate choices, despite the prep work down in our room: the on-line wine
list was out of date. Why does destiny toy with us this way?

Ah, but now came Aldo’s entrée, scallops. One side of the plate was coated with
something that looked unappetizingly like the loden-green algae that typically
grows in the spring on a garden’s steps. Aldo almost ignored it, the stuff, until
he scraped a little onto a scallop and ate them together. The puree was deeply
satisfying: a robust flavor of herbs and garlic that was, in fact, a superb
complement to the scallops. It was like a pesto from the stratosphere.

And you know what it was made from? Aldo asked our server, and she of course
obligingly informed us: stinging nettles.

Isn’t there a Tanizaki story with that title? If there is, and anyone has read it, can
he please let us know if it’s wonderfully perverse and kinky?

The stinging nettle is a common plant with spiky little needles on the leaf,
used for centuries for medicinal purposes and soups and, I suspect, practical jokes
by peasants. This puree was one of its more sublimely civilized uses. The chef, when
he visited the dining room at the end of the evening, was disgustingly young – no,
that isn’t what I was going to say, not “disgustingly.” Audaciously young. Yes, let’s say
that. He also presented us with small glasses of a nonalcoholic stinging-nettle
beer he had been developing: It was a sweet, gingery tonic.

At any rate, it was nice to know that something as simple as a stinging
nettle could, with a little culinary ingenuity, be elevated into something that, for
the space of a meal and then in memory, created one additional moment of
happiness on a very good day.

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.

We had once thought we might join in the sentimental festivities of Open That Bottle Night, as recommended and advocated by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, the Wall Street Journal wine columnists. It seems like a sweet idea: Uncork a wine that you’ve been saving, one that has a special memory or association for you and however many loved ones you want to include—a special bottle that you’ve put off drinking. Then we thought about it, Aldo and I, and instead we have come up with our own night to be celebrated Feb. 23, which happens to be when John and Dottie indulge in OTBN, an acronym that makes me think of off-track betting. Or we may celebrate it Feb. 24, the same night as the Oscars. Or Feb. 22. We aren’t sentimental about the date. It’s not really material. Not when you’re launching OTCWN:

Open That Can of Worms Night.

How this came to be is that—well, the fact of the matter is that by the time Aldo and I have finished the second half of any bottle, good or bad, we tend to find ourselves in the stark, dark minutes of what Aldo refers to as the Albee Hour. “Albee,” of course, is Edward, the playwright who has such a special talent for mining the cruelty latent in the phrase in vino veritas. I mean, if you hold in your hand a lily—in other words, if you begin the evening in a good, light state of mind—a nice bottle of wine will gild the mood. But if your mental state is more like a dry, irritated weed, a bottle of wine will make it sprout like crabgrass at the height of summer. Your sour mood will deepen with an almost invigorating perversity.

If you recognize this feeling, then you are ready to celebrate Open That Can of Worms Night.

And Aldo and I are always primed! Exhausting the dinner and the wine and not at all calmed by the soft, sudsy slursh of the water in dishwasher, we will embark upon an athletic ping-pong of barbed comments, mostly of the petty accusatory sort.

“This wine isn’t sufficiently chilled.”

“Well, it’s sufficiently uncorked, isn’t it? So what are you complaining about?”

“What does that mean?”

“You know what that means –”

And we’re off! Hence the can of worms or, depending on how vigorously you partake of OTCWN, the Pandora’s box, the closet full of skeletons, the rats in the attic, the mice in the cupboard, the rattle in the carborator, the fly trying to worm its way out of the ointment.

It’s really a simpler concept than John and Dottie’s, which means in a sense that it is also more elegant, more flexible, more distilled. Because, as I mentioned, you can commence with any bottle of wine with any meal on any night and any occasion. But if you aren’t sure you have it in you to really enjoy Open That Can of Worms Night, do this: Choose an evening that follows an unusually bilious day at the office. Uncork a wine you don’t even like (or that was given to you as a gift by someone you despise) and serve with an overcooked piece of meat, an insufficiently filleted salmon, or an undistinguished dollop of goatcheese. It may be as soon as a few sips that you will sense internally the thin, firm pressure of an opener slicing into an aluminum can and that small fizzy outrush of air.

“Remember that dinner in Verona for your birthday—?”

“You’re asking me to remember three things in one sentence—dinner, Verona and birthday. What am I, a goddamn encyclopedia?!”

If you’re truly in the Albee Hour, you may want to have a second bottle and a third and have some guests over and humiliate them and then fight over your child who doesn’t really exist. That, of course, is beyond Open That Can of Worms Night. That’s closer to Open That Vein Night.

Better, though, not to get carried away, dear reader. Never go to bed angry. This is all mere sport, an exercise in venting. “Put a cork in it,” as they say, then put your head to the pillow… and dream of your next Open That Can of Worms Night. It can be in 2009. Or tomorrow.