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.

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?

Aldo and I were staying with a friend in Chicago recently, roughly about the time that 2007 folded its arms across its chest and went off to heaven—late December, in other words—and decided to have dinner at the restaurant called Bin 36. The main draw for us was its corkscrew potential: It is a place that prides itself on its wine list and its skill in pairing those wines with food. Well, that sounded right up our bottle-lined alley. And so we went, my head as ever a sort of food-and-wine interpretation of the seasonal Nutcracker, with visions of vintages and viands dancing dancing with elegant merriment.

What we had in the end was a perfectly pleasant dinner with perfectly pleasant wines. But I felt I had paid for a commodity, then consumed it with a degree of satisfaction sufficient that I wouldn’t demand my money back—rather than achieving my true and constant goal of letting a few of the remaining hours of my life slip away in a fundamental pleasure. The restaurant was fairly upfront about the salesmanship of wine. There was a gift boutique in front and there small blackboard signs in the large dining area promoting wine classes and online merchandise. But no one seemed overly preoccupied with the ambiance. I mean the warm, intimate conviviality that blossoms when the right wine is served with good food. The room felt cold and large as a barn, and nothing in the course of our meal ever really distracted us from this atmosphere. You want the room to close in around you as your wine opens: It was the room that remained open.

The food was good. My appetitizer salad was prepared without distracting fanciness and of proportions that seemed Rabelaisain compared to the neat little stacks of green matter served in Manhattan. We all three of us started with a glass apiece of a gewurtraminer: the 2006 Fitz-Ritter Gewurztraminer Spatlese, an off-dry, very enjoyable wine with lots of fruit and acidity that made for a nice aperitif. Aldo would have rated it higher than I did, I think, but his tastes that night were to be suspected since he had just watched the DVD of Flashdance and kept singing Maniac. With our entrees, a duck breast and a hanger steak, we had a bottle of the 2004 Domaine St. Martin Marsannay Les Champs Salomon. Aldo thought the nose was, at any rate, wonderfully suggestive: He saw himself rolling around a large vat of dried rose petals. The imagery, he said, was borrowed from the dream sequence in American Beauty. But the wine was not ideal with the fowl or the meat: It had a certain thinness, and retreated like a small wave before the immense beach of all that hearty carnivorous fare.

Needless to say I blame only myself. I ordered the wine. I was the decider, and Aldo and our friend did not object to that: I sometimes think Aldo ought to put up more of a fight in these matters, actually. I watch the endless back-and-forth on the political primary trail and wish wine could be debated along with immigration. Then again, Aldo did cite American Beauty as part of his wine critique, and what does that tell you? At any rate, in the end we all agreed to forgive me and we hugged and cried over our coffee and resolved to go on in the future letting me be the decider anyway. But it can be a tough, challenging road. I don’t envy presidents one bit.