When Aldo asks me what it means to call a wine “haunting,” I assume this is another instance of his endearing childish literalness - this is Halloween season, after all. And so my first instinct is to provide the most childishly literal explanation possible. I tell him of the legendary bottle of Clos d’Escalier that for generations has struck terror in the hearts of the Escalier family of Provence.

It is their vineyard that produces the wine, and it is their family that suffers by it. The story goes that whenever a bottle of the long-depleted 1787 vintage appears unbidden in the dumbwaiter connecting the dining salon to the cellar, someone at dinner that evening will be dead by sunrise, as surely as Poe’s raven croaks, “Never again,” or “Oh no! Nurse!” or whatever. It all has something to do with a curse brought down on the Escaliers by a Madame Defarge-like crone at the time of the French Revolution. I believe the family refused her a 10 percent discount on a case.

This, at any rate, is a wine that could be called “haunting” with absolute accuracy.

“Thank you for that ghost tale,” says Aldo with a noticeable lack of blood-running-cold fear, “but I was referring to this wine review I was reading. The writer refers to a riesling spatlese as possessing, and I quote, a haunting beauty. I’m trying to think what that would be — a wine that haunts, let alone a wine that haunts beautifully.”

“Ah!

“What?”

“You’ve hit on a favorite topic of mine, the overreaching wine writer. I take it you never have had a quote-unquote haunting wine?”

“No.”

“And that would be correct, because the fact of the matter is that wine is not haunting, does not haunt. The only person it haunts is a wine writer overreaching for effect. I think we can agree that a wine might be memorable?”

“Yes.”

“Or even unforgettable?”

“Possibly.”

“But to say something haunts — that usually is underlined by a thin frisson of something disturbing, or negative. Much the way an image of a skull might haunt a person as a memento mori.”

“You mean a reminder of death.”

“Well, certainly not a reminder of lunch, Aldo.”

“Cheap sarcasm wounds deeply, Mr. Vivos. You know that.”

“Sorry. At any rate, a man could be haunted by the memory of slapping his mistress -”

“Now that’s an odd example -”

“Or by the memory, say, of killing her by conking her on the head with a bottle of wine and then disposing of the body before his wife finds out —”

“What is this, Desperate Housewives?”

“What I’m getting at is that wine writing tends to be imprecise to begin with. And when left in the hands of a writerly soul who may already be poetic and is made even more so by the ingestion of half a bottle - the phrasing melts into gush and then slush. I have had thousands of wines in my adult life, and I have not been haunted by any of them. Just like you. And neither us is any the poorer for it. We don’t need to be haunted by a wine, or thrown into the ecstasies of St. Teresa of Avila.”

“All we need is the corkscrew –.”

“That’s correct, Aldo.”

“– Which releases the spirits in the bottle. I wonder if that means a writer could describe a bottle in terms of Linda Blair.”

“Head-turning.”

“Levitating.”

Then Aldo does his impression of Linda Blair swearing at Ellen Burstyn, and the conversation ends.

Yes, there is a Wine Museum in Italy. It’s a sort of curatorial outcropping of what the Italians call agriturismo, and it is to be found in a small, clean, neat town in Umbria called Torgiano, which we assume is pronounced with dulcet tenderness as “Tor-jee-an-o,” the syllables seeping out in a trickle, but which one local – responding to our request for directions – pronounces fiercely with a much more economical “tor-jon-o.” He makes it sound like a medieval weapon or torture device.

Torgiano is located not too far to the south of Perugia, where we are staying at the Hotel Brufani. But the traffic circle leading out of Perugia is so cluttered with meaningless signs pointing to obscure towns that I believe it takes us at least six hours to get there. It is, in fact, late in the day when we park in an otherwise empty lot on the edge of the place. The light is a soft pigeony gray that offsets very nicely the simple, dignified war-memorial in an adjacent leafy little park. Torgiano, as I said, is neat, clean and proper, despite its age, although Aldo keeps muttering, “I’m gettin’ them di Chirico creeps.”

“Well,” I ask, “isn’t that better than being back in the States and getting the Andrew Wyeth willies or something?”

Yet Torgiano does have a certain di Chirico stillness to it: the tall tower with the clock tells time even though the place is so empty there seems to be no one to tell time to other than some old men leaning against buildings and a few women with children. They are all waiting for the daylight to end, I suppose. The stillness has a sense, too, of Antonioni and his slow tracking shots across the piazza at nap time.

However, that this is a carefully manicured little community probably has less to do with di Chirico or Antonioni than the influence of the Lungarotti family and their winery outside town. Their business began back in the early ’60s, and now they have a hotel in Torgiano, and a restaurant, and they created and run the museum. There’s also an olive oil museum.

We are the only visitors to the museum: It’s less than an hour to closing, we are told by the woman at the ticket booth. She has tall, complicated blond hair and makes me think of Monica Vitti in a character role.

One traipses in and out of a series of salons that are densely but sensibly organized with everything from the basic equipment that has gone into pressing grapes since before the industrial age onto decorative pieces, and wine labels, and chalices, and cups, and a centuries-old ceramic bust of Pope Clement cradling a bunch of ripe grapes as if he had just been given a kitten. It would be cute if Clement also didn’t look tipsy.

Aldo and I are not bowled over, really, but that probably wouldn’t happen anyway unless the museum galleries led into a shaded courtyard and Monica Vitti reappeared with a pleasant bottle of Lungarotti wine, perhaps the Rubesco, its trademark DOC wine.

We leave Torgiano and drive back toward Perugia. Ancient stone towns, Assisi included, dot the hills, and vistas along the way open up onto grape vines. And yet, despite this gentle lesson in agriturismo, what Aldo and I will most remember is a slight nagging chill — that we somehow stumbled onto a pedestrian tour mapped out by the Edward Hopper of Italy.

Aldo and I, in town for a few days, rent bikes and cycle around all afternoon: quicksilver weather, hot, cool, breezes from the ocean and the trees and the hills. Aldo is unhappy trying to figure out the gears, and the boy does not like going uphill, and then downhill he’s afraid of losing control of the handlebars. We pause in front of the Biltmore in Montecito, and the ocean view could be a Manet: Everyone moving happily in the wind and light, the red and yellow and purple flowers bursting from the green hedges. Then a late lunch – a salad – and a walk out to the end of the Santa Barbara pier.

There’s a clam shack there where Julia Child used to eat – clams, I assume, not shacks — but no commemorative bust or statue of that Sequoia of cuisine. The sun goes in and out of clouds of fog, looking more like a moon than a sun.

By 8:30 we have worked up stupendous appetites worthy of Miss Child herself.

Dinner is at Bouchon on Victoria Street. A restaurant famous for its wine list, focused so intensely on Santa Barbara County vineyards that other West Coast State wines are relegated to a separate sheet of paper, like footnotes to a grand academic thesis. The wait staff talk very knowledgeably about the local wines, and pleasantly too. Our waitress has a Sigourney Weaver angularity and red eyeglass frames that I find mesmerizing. I wonder if what I think are her glittering blue eyes are actually irises painted on the back of her lenses. This is before anything has been drunk, by the way.

I order sauteed mushrooms followed by duck with a rich succotash, and to drink? The 2003 Palmina Nebbiolo. This is a wine so big (over 15 percent) that past the two-third mark on the bottle Aldo comments that he feels as if his head were about to fall off and slide into the Pacific Ocean.

We were told that the wine would benefit from a few minutes opening up, but this proves debatable. The more it opens, the more it becomes jammy, the more every sip competes with every bite of food for attention – fights, really. It’s like a stuffed sofa that has to be shoved out of the way, over and over.

Wine should have flavor, and a nose, and body, and alcohol, and all that, but if it is to be paired successfully with food doesn’t it require a certain transparency? You want to be able to taste “through” the wine to get at that duck, or sauteed mushroom, or Poptart, if you’re that perverse.

So although this Palmina is a conscientious act of construction, balanced and powerful, well… one could say the same thing of the Eiffel Tower.

On the walk back to our hotel along State Street, just a few blocks from Boucheron, a young man with strong tattooed forearms happens to park his bicycle on the corner as we pass. He dips his hand into front pockets filled with white powder – chalk, not cocaine – and proceeds to rappel up the ornate terra-cotta front of a building. Two and a half stories, I’d say. We’re astounded: It’s like a Cirque du Soleil audition.

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.

Any American tourist who objects to rude service is an idealist who might have made a good minor character in Candide. I believe they tend to be crushed in gleeful sadistic ways. Rudeness goes with the territory. It has for centuries.

The thing is this: what I experienced last night in Rome at the restaurant Gusto could be just that, traditional rudeness. But Billy Vivos is no ordinary American tourist either. Aldo is, yes. Aldo has a recurring dream - he had it at our hotel –– that he dies and goes to heaven and heaven is EuroDisney. The seraphim all look like Minnie Mouse. But Billy Vivos likes to look for the bigger picture; he likes to discern the patterns in the sediment at the bottom of his wine glass; and I tell you what I experienced at Gusto is new and deserves its own new word: “eutitude,” short for EU attitude.

“Eutitude” is bad behavior borne not of culturual condescension, hostility or insecurity, but of the slicing sharpening knives of competition. Am I an economist you might ask? No, I am not. But I can smell things in the Roman air the way other tourists say they smell bread baking outside their hotels. I smell eutitude!

And what would that be, eutitude? It is a tensing and corruption of commercial dining’s emotional atmosphere caused by the use of international business models, spreadsheets and currency charts. There! I hammered it out in one dense sentence. I feel like a psychic coming out of a trance.

About Gusto: Gusto is a grand and apparently successful food complex, all passionately upscale: There’s an upscale kitchen store, an upscale wine bar, and an upscale restaurant than spills out onto a white-marbled, doric-columned portico serving as a dining area for people who are proportionately upscale themselves. They sit in the Roman night air, happy in anticipation of being fed by an establishment written up in all the magazines, and while waiting to order they can sample history at its most chic as they look out toward the Altar of Augustus. The A of A, you see, is encased in a gleaming pale Richard Meier gallery that currently houses an exhibit that pays tribute to Valentino, the designer. Aldo thought he must be a late Caesar, possibly the one Russell Crowe killed at the end of Gladiator.

Tonight Gusto is packed with a sophisticated European and American crowd, all speaking English to the wait staff before lapsing into German or French or English among themselves. The wait staff appear to me to be frantic, hopping from table to table and diner to diner like teenage employees of a mall pizzeria. And here comes our sommelier, who also happens to be one of our waitresses: She is wan and thin and asthetic looking, as if her relations dropped her off outside a convent expecting her to be a novice, but somehow she never made it through the convent gates. Since then, she has been working hard in the thankless food services industry, bringing international diners their primi and secondi courses of vaguely Italianate cuisine.

I order a Colle di Maggio “Turlino,” a new soft-styled Lazio syrah, from this young lady, and she returns with it briskly and cheerfully. With a faraway, deadened look of Charlie Chaplin in the factory in Modern Times, she uncorks it with fearsome dexterity. She doesn’t show me the label; indeed, I have to grab it from her to make sure it’s the bottle I ordered. She barely waits for me to look at the bottle and smell the wine before she thunks the bottle onto the table. Now here’s the thing. She isn’t being a snob: It’s not that she doesn’t care whether I like the wine or not – she doesn’t have time. She instead must leap to her next task, bringing a prosperous, polite, middle-aged German couple next to us a beer and a glass of champagne, and then to the prosperous German couple next to them an ice bucket for their white wine. This is a strange and pointless contraption, this ice bucket, and the poor girl must set it up like a child’s booster seat: Rather than a freestanding model, it has to be clamped onto the table’s ledge. There isn’t much space separating any of our tables, so our smiling empty-eyed automaton without apology moves us all a few inches further apart: She seems to be lost in some strange dream. We are jostled, put out, annoyed; but how would she know that? She is busy, she listens to some other inner voice or command: I wonder if someone in Brussels isn’t communicating telepathically to an Italian finance minister, who in turn beams out an encoded message that blips urgently in the sommelier’s mind:

The Italian economic miracle depends on you! The euro must maintain its strength against the dollar! Maximize your table turnover! Who knows where the American tourists will be tomorrow – heading for China for the Olympics!

This isn’t a sommelier, it’s a flight attendant on a major airline.

This is A Clockwork Orange with a corkscrew.