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.

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.