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As it happens, he was friends with my oenophiliac mentor Julian Barnes, and I subsequently shared a number of bottles with him over dinners at Julian’s house. As a guest he was always vague and complimentary about the wine. Not so in print. Again, I couldn’t help liking him, if only because he wrote some of the sharpest and funniest wine criticism of all time, collected in a slim volume called Waugh on Wine.

In his essay “Perils of Being a Wine Writer,” he declares, “Wine writing should be camped-up. The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered where there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies underwear.” As a wine writer I consider Waugh a forebear of sorts, although I have to admit that I am more of a lover than a killer. While I have encountered many despicable wines in the course of pursuing my duties as a wine columnist, I’ve written more often about those that make me drool, that make me weak in the knees, that make the hair on the back of my arms stand at attention. That make me want to howl at the moon and kiss my girlfriend repeatedly.

The title under which I hoped to write my column, “An Idiot in the Cellar,” reflected my ambition to be honest about my own ignorance relative to the acumen of professional critics like Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson. Dominique quashed the title, and I suppose that now, ten years later, it would be disingenuous to pretend I haven’t learned what malolactic fermentation is, or that I can’t usually distinguish a Burgundy from a Bordeaux.

Anyone who drinks and tastes as often as I do is bound to have the equivalent of a fish story, a tale of a blind-tasting triumph, and mine dates back to a moment some four years ago. Watching me that night at New York’s La Grenouille restaurant, a stuffy temple of the old-style haute cuisine, you might have believed I was truly an expert. I had arrived late for a dinner party thrown by a deep-pocketed friend. The other guests were already seated and had red wine in their glasses. A carafe sat on the table. “Here’s Jay,” my friend announced. “He knows wine. He’ll guess what we’re drinking.” Somehow this announcement coincided with a lull in the converstational din throughout the room; it seemed to me that all eyes from the surrounding tables, in addition to those of my dinner companions, were turned on me. The sommelier, who happened to be standing nearby, handed me a glass and poured from the carafe, then stood back and smirked, while the entire restaurant, or so it seemed to me at the time, looked up at me expectantly. Unable to think of any graceful escape, I stuck my nose in the glass. “Haut-Brion,” I declared, eliciting a chorus of gasps. I examined the color and took a sip. “Nineteen eighty-two,” I added. From the expressions of surprise and wonder I could see that I’d scored. I sat down to bask in the general admiration, and felt that perhaps all my years of drinking and tasting and spitting and reading had not been entirely wasted. Of course, there was a story behind this story, a bit of a trick involved, as there often is, and you’ll find it in the following pages in my essay on Haut-Brion.

A far more typical story, which demonstrates the precariousness of my claim to expertise, was a recent dinner that involved Haut-Brion’s sister property, La Mission–Haut-Brion. I was visiting my friend Julian once again at his home in North London. My dinner partner, Jancis Robinson, the excessively modest and exceedingly attractive wine authority, had just correctly guessed that the wine we were drinking was a Bordeaux from the Graves district. “Well, it can’t be La Mission,” I said confidently—La Mission–Haut-Brion being among my favorite wines. “Well, it is,” Julian