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As much sadomasochistic fun as I find it to be, comparing and contrasting old Bordeaux vintages is less and less a part of the job description for the postmodern wine writer, and I think my own interests and tastes reflect certain trends. I still have a lot of Bordeaux in my cellar, right up to vintage 2003, and come August I start to follow weather reports from that part of the world. Bordeaux was my first love, and it remains a kind of touchstone. But increasingly I am drawn to its rival Burgundy, the Turgenev to Bordeaux’s Tolstoy, and when I’m looking for sheer power and exuberance and less finesse, to the Dostoyevskian southern Rhône. If my first collection of columns devoted inordinate space to the cult Cabernets of the Napa Valley (think Hemingway), whose emergence more or less coincided with my own career as a wine writer, it seems to me that Sonoma and Santa Barbara County Pinots (Fitzgerald) are the new cultish reds. These wines are inspired in part by the great red wines of France’s Burgundy region, and the renaissance there, driven in part by a younger generation inheriting the old domains, is another heartening development. Pinot has become a household word since its starring role in Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Syrah, meanwhile, keeps threatening to become a Californian star, but so far its career has been a little like that of the actor Orlando Bloom, more promising than happening. Or even—Syrah being a high-testosterone grape—more like that of Colin Farrell, a putative star who has yet to produce a major hit.

France and the Napa Valley are increasingly sharing the wine lists of major restaurants and the hearts of wine lovers with other regions. Stellenbosch, Solvang, Mendoza, Priorat, and Alba are among my recent destinations. When I started the column Argentina was a joke and Spain was still emerging from the shadows of the Franco era; now Argentinian Malbec, grown in the high foothills of the Andes, is a hot commodity and Spain has probably overtaken Italy as a fashionable food-and-wine destination among grape nuts and foodies. Fruit-bombastic Barossa Valley Shiraz and grapefruity New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough have become two of the world’s great wine types, even as other regions in both countries produce increasingly noteworthy juice. And South Africa, a country that has been under vine since the seventeenth century, seems to be well on its way to becoming the new Australia. My friend Anthony Hamilton Russell is making incredible Burgundian Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays at the southernmost tip of Africa, in vineyards from which he regularly excavates half-million-year-old hand axes and other artifacts of our earliest ancestors.

In all of these places, advances in viticulture have inevitably been accompanied by the evolution of gastronomy. And in fact my own wine education has brought me gradually into a greater appreciation of food, as has my association with Lora Zarubin, the food editor of House & Garden, who almost inevitably accompanies me on these trips. Lora was, for all too brief a period, the owner and chef of Lora’s, one of my favorite New York restaurants of the eighties. At the time downtown restaurants were divided into those places where you went to see and be seen and those you went to for the food. Lora’s had a surfeit of celebrity patrons, but the food was the real draw; it was a homey place with a refreshingly simple menu at a time when chefs were competing to see how many diverse and incompatible ingredients they could cram into one dish, when every meal seemed to be topped with something along the lines of raspberry chili cilantro vinaigrette with green-tea anchovy sorbet. Ah, yes, the eighties. Who can remember them? Strangely enough, I do remember a sublime grilled chicken I had upstairs at Lora’s. When I first saw the menu I didn’t know what to make of it—so devoid of frills and flourishes. Where the hell was the chipotle mango pesto? When I later learned