The holidays are approaching, are here in fact, and yet Aldo and I have chosen to spend the night indoors as if there were a howling blizzard outside, and seasonal carolers could only make themselves heard to the rescue dogs by singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” from deep inside the drifts in which they are buried. Aldo is already in his robe and reading the letters of Noel Coward, which he finds absorbing, except that he gets tired of them from time to time and will watch a cartoon on YouTube. I take this opportunity to record for the sake of my eager public a few notes on a wine we had recently, Michel Tete’s Domaine du Clos du Fief:

Medium intense ruby core fading to a pink watery rim, which makes me think of a flamingo melting. Medium aromas of cinnamon, tart cherries, musk and soil. I suppose one might ask soil from where? Julienas, France, presumably. On the palate: Dry. High acidity. Medium bodied, which Aldo used to be when he was more religious about aerobic exercise. Medium also as to the alcohol and the tannins. Flavors of cherries, both tart and dried, nutmeg, peat and leather. I remember in particular that Aldo insisted he tasted peat and leather – peat on leather. “There is a difference,” he said. “Some princesses are more discerning about peas than others.” At the finish there comes a little light berry twist.

The wine is balanced. Lean without much concentration or intensity, which I suppose is how I would describe Aldo back in the days when he did exercise religiously. It might be summed up as a slightly more refined and serious beaujolais.

I have a small note here saying that Aldo also described it as “faintly grim,” and I should have asked him in greater detail just what he meant by that. Who drinks a faintly grim wine other than a Puritan or Oliver Cromwell on a feast day? But he’s watching a cartoon at the moment, and I don’t want to distract him until he goes back to his reading.

We were sharing a bottle of the 2004 Domaine Rimbert “Le Mas au Schist” over a nice, simple late-autumn supper of sausages, apples and rice. We had indulged in our usual exercise of wine anaylsis, starting with an observation of the deep purple core, then taking in the dark fruit and dusky perfume on the nose. Yet I noticed that Aldo seemed to be holding back.

I don’t mean just reticent. I mean I thought he was holding back tears.

I asked him what on earth could be troubling him when we were embarked on this tasty St. Chinian wine, and he said – after a certain amount of hemming and hawing that made my compassionate mood rather thinner than it started out to be – that he had been reading online about a famous experiment conducted with a group of wine experts:

They had been given glasses of wine, some red, some white, and asked to describe and identify them. Well, the trick was that the wines were all the same white: some had merely been reddened with vegetable dye. And yet the experts went on to describe the doctored white in classic, even hackneyed terms of red.

To me, this was not news: There have been plenty of tests in which blindfolded experts couldn’t distinguish between a white and a red. But to Aldo, this all raised terrible doubt: He seemed as sad as a child uncertain about Santa, or a saint in a dark night of the soul over the really big questions of God and heaven and so on. I have never had a dark night of the soul, fortunately. My sleep is too important to me, and usually the wine with dinner seals the deal.

I think I would say Aldo’s case was touching, in its display of vulnerability, but also annoying, in that he was entertaining doubts about me.

I know this because he said so. He didn’t say, “How do I know, Billy, that you are as genuinely expert as I have always believed? How am I to firm up my old trust in your abilities, which have, sometimes certainly, verged on genius?” He may have been thinking that, I suppose. But what he said was: “Wouldn’t it be fun, Billy, if I did that with you?”

“Did what?”

“Blindfolded you, say, and had you determine what you were drinking. It would be wine, of course. I wouldn’t try and trick you with soda or grape juice. But it would be fun.”

“What’s fun about that?”

“To see you proved right.”

“If I am going to be proved right, why waste the time? I can see perfectly well what this is about, testing your shakey faith.”

“Don’t be silly, Billy. I was baptized and confirmed and have a real shot at a Knight of Malta garter and certificate, if I write a big enough check.”

“I mean faith in me. I am not going to indulge in some sort of game, Aldo, just because you’re afraid I’m fallible. If anything, I would think you wanted to shield me from anything that might – I don’t want to say expose me, because that implies I have something to hide. And I do not.”

“Well, I do wonder now how much anyone can know. I would try this on Robert Parker, but I’d have to buy a gun and break through his damned security. Doesn’t he live in a mansion compound surrounded by a moat with piranhas and an electric fence with armed guards in turrets?”

“Yes, and why shouldn’t he? The Bordeaux assassins speak fluent English and can bluff their way past anyone. And what would it matter? Does it really matter if a person, tricked into a false position, falls back on preconceptions and memories?”

“I believe it might. Might matter.”

I determined that in future I would not let Aldo open a bottle of wine out of my sight: He knows how to make the sound of a cork popping by plucking his cheek with his finger. Who knows what he might pour me?

This was an awful blow, and I knew we would eventually overcome it, but for now Aldo’s mistrust in me had created just as much if not more mistrust in him. We continued to drink our wine, and eventually enjoyed it, and got a soft buzz from it. But the evening no longer was what it might have been.

In bed, I prayed for the safety of Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson and Kermit Lynch, then lay awake for a spell, my head percolating with anxiety. Was this a dark night of the soul? Then I fell asleep, and slept in till ten a.m.

I keep it on my desk, and the first thing you might think if you saw it there was: Why has Billy left a baking potato here? It is brown, and finely pocked on the surface. To this day Aldo says he’s tempted to wrap it in foil and pop it into the oven. But to the touch it is solid and
heatless, and in the palm of your hand it has heft. This is my pudding stone, my galet, that I slipped into the pocket of my coat as a memento of our trip to Provence.

We were heading back to our hotel in Avignon after an afternoon’s drive up and around and around and down Mont Ventoux and in and out of some neighboring towns. This was in mid-March. The day before had been rain-soaked, which made for a rather pleasantly melancholy stroll through the ancient cemetery, Les Alyscamps—there’s a Van Gogh painting that captures the romantic moldiness of it all—but today the air had cleared and was crisp and giving way to spring. We had come down off Mont Ventoux, as I say, and were driving through the vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape with perhaps only half an hour or so to sundown: The road, the trees, the vineyards, the gentle hills were saturated with long bands of deep yellow light striated by blue shadow.

“Aldo, take a picture!”

I think I may have said this as a command when it should have instead come across as a polite request made urgent by the thrill of the moment. At any rate, Aldo tends to dig in his heels at command-requests, and he answered firmly that there was no point, the light had gone. But here I was in a beautiful stretch of wine country, and even if I remembered it afterward—as I do now—it seemed terrible that I couldn’t hold onto something more
concrete than a memory. I pulled the car to the side of the road, and this time I did command:

“Aldo, go get me one of those pudding stones from the vineyard.”

If you are wondering what a pudding stone is, I will tell you now. The French call it a galet. It’s simply a stone, a rock, an aggrandized pebble with a sense of its worth in the scheme of vinification, that holds down the soil in a vineyard and protects the dirt and the vines. It warms the earth with stored heat from the sun, and shields the earth from the cool of night. No big deal, I guess: a rock. It’s not as if the vineyards were covered with gorgeous glass marbles, or protected by some exotic kind of ferret trained to stretch itself out and wrap its fur around the stems of the vines. Just a rock that’s older than any one of us and deployed by a French winemaker following a tradition that dates back centuries. But it has its role in things, and to be able to claim you have a role in Chateauneuf-du-Pape - well, you are a very significant stone, c’est tout.

And so I told Aldo to go get me a pudding stone, and Aldo once again dug in his heals and informed me that, no, he was not about to steal.

“But it’s just a rock. A small rock.”

“I take the Ten Commandments very seriously. Or at least that one, because it’s morally uncomplicated. Don’t steal stones, don’t steal diamonds, don’t rob banks, don’t rob landscapes. It’s what I believe is called a blanket commandment. You’ll note that isn’t the Commandment the Israelites disobeyed, either. They built a golden calf. They didn’t sneak rocks off French farmland.”

“What about when you fibbed on your expense account?”

“I don’t think I fibbed, and a fib isn’t the same as a theft, and besides I think I sufficiently explained to my office why I needed those carp.”

Aldo would not do my bidding, in short, and I ended up hopping out of the car myself and bounding a few steps into the field. There were rabbits, and they hopped away in a panic, as if aware of a thief in their midst. I picked up one stone, then another, and another before I found one that had the right size—the baking potato.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” said Aldo, looking around as if worried that an alarm might go off and the grapes blink bright red to signal a breach in security. “Allons!”

And that was how the stone came to be in my house, on my desk, and if you mistake it for a potato, I tell you it is Chateauneuf-du-Pape, it is a vineyard, it is Provence: and if you touch it, pick it up, you are part of all that too.

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.