And then there are the millions of consumers who, far from these controversies and disputes, just want a decent glass of wine with their dinners.

I thought about these themes recently when I was down in Vicksburg, Miss., for my grandson’s second birthday party. The historic river-town, the upside-down apex of the Mississippi Delta, is a four-hour drive from Memphis if you take I-55 to Jackson and turn west. My son told me that he would be cooking hamburgers, hot dogs and sausages on the grill outside, and I told him that I would bring some red wine fit to accompany such hearty, smoky, meaty fare. I rummaged through the wine rack and chose six bottles, two each of some pretty damned big cabernets, merlots and syrahs. As it happened, I misread the audience.

People assembled for the party that afternoon — neighbors, friends, the parents of my grandson’s daycare compadres — good, kind folk who have been helpful and generous to my son and his little family since they moved to Vicksburg about 18 months ago. I was introduced, inevitably, as a wine expert who had brought special wines to the party, but when I offered my wares, the questions repeatedly put to me were these: “Do you have anything sweet?” and “Do you have anything that’s not too heavy?”

Stop, readers, before you say, “Oh, those kinds of people.” Those kinds of people comprise most of the wine consumers in America, and I promise you that they’re completely unconcerned about notions of place and terroir, of natural wines versus manipulated wines, of auctions and ratings and in what forests deep in France’s heartland the mighty oaks grew that provided the wood for the barrels that aged whatever wine you and I might be having with dinner tonight. No, those kinds of people desire a wine that’s not substantial, not shaped by oak or laden with tannin, not complicated or multi-dimensional, but rather a wine that’s pleasant, easy to drink, flavorful and, yes, it’s true in many cases, a little sweet. A friendly electrician at the newspaper where I used to work told me once that nothing in the world made him happier than going home to a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and a glass of port, and he didn’t mean a glass of port after dinner, he meant with the spaghetti, and who was I to say “Gack!” (I assume he meant a glass of non-vintage ruby port, not, you know, Taylor-Fladgate ‘66.)

It’s a commonplace saying of the wine industry and wine commentary that what we call “fine wine” — intended for cellaring and aging –occupies about five percent of the wine made in the world, while the other 95 percent consists of everyday wine meant for fairly immediate consumption. In terms of writing about wine, of course, that five percent has traditionally received about 95 percent of the attention, though the proliferation of blogs dedicated to inexpensive wine may have changed that estimate to some degree. Of course fine wine is far more interesting to taste and write about than everyday wine, just as Philip Roth is more interesting to read and write about than Nora Roberts (though as a model of industry she should be an inspiration to us all). Everyday wine, however, is important enough as a huge market for American consumers that as a product it should be better than just serviceable.

I certainly understand the desire to own a winery that produces, say, a thousand cases of exceptional cabernet sauvignon or pinot noir that commands a dear price and garners glowing reviews and awards. How many people do such wines affect, however? Perhaps a few hundred collectors and restaurants in New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Isn’t it a nobler endeavor to produce 100,000 cases of a well-made, dependable, delicious wine that costs $12 a bottle and that will bring pleasure to millions of people in their homes and favorite bistros? I recently interviewed the wine manager for a small, well-run restaurant in Memphis who said that he can’t offer Napa Valley wines by the glass or bottle for a reasonable price, even though he would like to. The reason? “They’re not good enough,” he said. That’s an assessment borne out by my experience, though I would expand the criticism to California as a whole. Generally speaking, wines in the $10 to $15-a-bottle range are better from Spain, Italy and Argentina (not so much Australia anymore) than from West Coast producers.

There’s not a thing wrong with making simple, decent, palatable wines that display enough personality that one would want to drink another glass and buy another bottle. And of course there’s nothing wrong with making superbly nuanced, elegant, deeply layered and profound wines for those who can afford them. I think, though, that a great segment of the wine consuming audience — an audience that wants good wine, not plonk, not dreck — exists only at the margins of the wine industry’s consciousness, like my son’s neighbors down in Vicksburg. They tried the full-bodied, tannic wines I poured for them, were polite about them, and then went looking for the beer.

I had not seen 1001 Wines You Must Taste Before You Die (Universe Publishing, $36.95), even though the book was released in 2008, but happening upon it in a local bookstore, I picked it up and was intrigued. My thought, of course, was, “How many of these wines have I tasted?”

One does tire of the 1001 … Before You Die phenomenon, which seems to proliferate with the speedy generation of the sappy Chicken Soup for the Soul books and the endless Blankety-Blank for Dummies series. What I’m waiting for is the snappy 1001 Ways to Die, surely a definitive wrap-up to the concept.

Anyway, I bought the compact but hefty tome, brought it home and began to go through it methodically, marking the wines I have experienced with little yellow sticky-note things. Soon the book absolutely bristled with little yellow sticky-note things, like a pale spiky punk hair-do. And yet when I counted the little yellow sticky-note things, they totaled only 232. Sacre bleu! 232! A mere 23 percent! What have I been doing for the past 25 years?

The book’s essential wines, the ones we must taste before we shuffle off this mortal coil, were chosen by a panel of 43 experts, 25 of whom are British, so it’s easy to understand the book’s bias in favor of French wines, with which the British have a relationship going back 800 years and more. In fact, of the 1001 wines mentioned, 323 are French, and of those 104 are from Bordeaux. Not that that’s a bad thing, and I would say that the French wines are certainly balanced by worthy, interesting, intriguing and obscure picks from other parts of the world. If only because the book inspires curiosity and the desire to seek out new and unknown wines, we must count it a (rather intimidating) success.

Here’s the scheme: The book is divided into these sections — Sparkling wines, White wines, Red wines (by far the biggest segment) and Fortified wines. The order within each section is alphabetical. The entry includes some historical detail and a description of the recommended wine, which is always, where appropriate (that is, not a nonvintage product), vintage specific. In other words, the expert doesn’t say, “You must taste Chateau Leoville-Las Cases or Stefano Inama Vulcaia Fume Sauvignon Blanc before you die,” but Leoville-Las Cases 1996 or Stefano Inama Vulcaia Fume Sauvignon Blanc 2001. This method works with a wine like the Leonetti Cellars Merlot 2005, which is available all over the Internet from about $70 to $90, but not so well with, say, the Domaine Hubert de Montille Volnay Les Taillepieds Premier Cru 1985, which I have to say, we should all taste before we die, but good luck with that unless you find some at auction and possess the fiduciary prowess to purchase it.

Certainly a wine like Chateau Mouton-Rothschild is a necessity for anyone with pretensions to a well-rounded palate and historical perspective, but the vintage recommended in the book for Mouton is 1945. Now Mouton-Rothschild 1945 stands loftily among the greatest wines made in the 20th Century, and it should be obvious that, 65 years later, the supply is dwindling. In 2006, a case of Mouton ‘45 sold at Christie’s in Beverley Hills for an insane $290,000; you see individual bottles priced from $5,000 to $12,000. So, ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, yes, we would taste Mouton 1945 before we die — and the CVNE Corona Reserva Blanco Semi Dulce 1939 and other old wines — but our chances of doing so are about as remote as Lady Gaga singing Tosca at La Scala.

What’s interesting about the book, though, is that not all the selections are esoteric, expensive or unattainable. There are, for example, two of my favorite inexpensive red wines from Spain, Castaño’s Hecula Monastrell 2004 from Yecla and Borsao’s Tres Picos Garnacha 2005 from Campo de Borja. Must we taste them before we die? I don’t know about that, but they’re damned fine, completely accessible wines that you can buy for 10 or 11 smackers. You would want more recent vintages, of course.

And then there are the book’s provocative eccentricities. Mateus? Blue Nun? Surely the title of that book would be Wines I Would Rather Die 1001 Deaths Before I Tasted. Mateus is described as “one of the few truly global wine brands,” while Blue Nun is called “a triumph of marketing and rebranding.” Aren’t those precisely the reasons why thoughtful consumers don’t drink some products?

So, about my 232 wines, you could say that I cheated in some instances, but I will justify my claims. For example, I have not tasted Domaine Jean Grivot Richebourg Grand Cru 2002, the vintage recommended in the book, but I did taste the 1998, from the barrel, in Grivot’s dim cellar, my toes numb with the chill on a blustery, rainy December afternoon. I have not tasted Chateau Haut-Brion 1989, but i have tasted Haut-Brion 1975, ‘67, ‘66, ‘64, ‘62, ‘60, ‘59, ‘57, ‘55 and ‘37. I have not tasted Diamond Creek Gravelly Meadow 1978 (and where the hell would you find it now?), but I did taste Diamond Creek Red Rock Terrace 1977 “First Pick” and Red Rock Terrace ‘77 “Second Pick,” Volcanic Hill 1979 “First Pick” and Volcanic Hill ‘70 “Second Pick,” and the Three Vineyard Blend 1981 and ‘84, with Al Brounstein, sitting at a picnic table on the property. My point, Readers, is that you take your cred where you can, and add up the score later.

On the other hand, I was surprised, if not downright pleased, at how many of the wines I had tasted in the specified vintages. Salon 1996? But of course, my dears. Chateau Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1982? It goes without saying. Penfolds Bin 95 Grange 1971 (or Grange Hermitage as the wine was known originally)? Not only 1971 but every vintage going back to 1955. And so on, blah blah blah, that’s all fine, but the humbling factor remains the 769 recommended wines I have not tasted, tons of fascinating wines from Italy, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Portugal. Time’s a-wastin’. I had better get busy.

And I’ll conclude with a dozen perhaps slightly eccentric recommendations of my own, wines that I believe deserve attention, for the book’s next edition (without specific vintages):

Domaine Serene Evenstad Reserve Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley.
Tres Sabores Perspective Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, Napa Valley.
Robert Sinskey Vin Gris of Pinot Noir, Los Carneros, Napa Valley.
Robert Sinskey Vandal Vineyard Pinot Noir, Los Carneos, Napa Valley.
Porter Bass Zinfandel, Russian River Valley.
Tenuta di Valgiano, Colline Lucchesi Rosso.
Reale Andrea Borgo di Gete, Colli di Salerno.
Albet i Noya Lignum Red, Penedes.
Domaine Beauthorey Bella Parra, Pic Saint-Loup, Languedoc.
Champagne David Léclapart Cuvée L’Apôtre. (A vintage blanc de blancs that sees oak.)
Champagne David Léclapart Cuvée L’Amateur. (A vintage blanc de blancs sans oak.)
Peter Jakob Kühn Oestrich Doosberg Riesling, Rheingau.

The post popped a thought into my head. I wondered first whether this was a bottle that you were sent or that you bought for at-home dining.

The reason I wondered: if wine writers are trying to reach the general audience and not the geek, your cheese toast with a $45 Pinot Noir might seem rather extravagant (to the audience). If that is the case, then I further wonder what exactly are we saying to the general audience that likely can’t afford a $45 wine just to have each night with dinner, let alone with toast!

Well, ahem, I suppose (I answered) that part of it has to do with the element of surprise, of extravagance, even of theater, in the sense that I don’t mind if people think, “That F.K., what a goof-ball, opened a $45 pinot noir with his cheese toast!” Yeah, I’ll do pretty much anything, verbally and conceptually, for a laugh, for a bit of attention, to keep — and this is the motivation — people coming back to BTYH.

Of course most of the wine I write about comes to me as samples, so, perhaps unfairly, I do have the ability to snatch a $45 wine from the rack to open with my cheese toast or roast chicken or whatever. Such wines exist, and I don’t think they should be ignored just because they’re expensive.

I also provide reviews of inexpensive wines, as in the Wine of the Week (rarely over $20) and in, for example, the post called “12 Under $20: White” that went up on Nov. 8. It’s probably not a good idea to try to be all things to all people, or the general all-purpose wine-writer and reviewer, but there it is.

Just to make amends, however, yesterday I made some cheese toast for my lunch, and before I reached for a wine to open, I thought, “Careful now, let’s be fair to The Readers.” So I opened a bottle of Redtree Pinot Noir 2008, California, which cost me — yes, my own hard-earned cash –the princely sum of $9. And you know what? Not only was it a pleasant and drinkable little wine, it actually displayed hints of real pinot noir character, in the form of smoky black cherry scents and flavors, plums with a hint of cola, subtle touches of spicy cranberry and rhubarb and a bit of clean earthiness; it even offers some pinot noir satiny sleekness for texture. The alcohol level — 12.5 percent — makes no demands. I rate the Redtree Pinot Noir ‘08, a product of Cecchetti Wine Co., Very Good. At about $9, it represents Good Value, though you see it around the country as low as $6.50.

See, I’m not always “Mr. Forty-Five-Dollar Man.”

First come aromas of lavender and licorice and leather, with hints of some beefy element, and then spiced and macerated black currants, blackberries and plums. Then — we’re still at the nose — dusty potpourri, damp slate, dried porcini, something rooty and brambly. There’s plenty here to entice and beguile. In the mouth: Black and blue fruit flavors — there’s a hint of blueberry — cushioned by moderately chewy tannins and suave oak in a package that’s more drinkable than austere. The oak regimen was a reasonable 10 months in French (70%) and American (30%) barrels, only 35 percent of which were new, so the oak component is balanced and does not deliver the toastiness and overt spiciness that can come when new wood dominates.

What I really want to mention, though, is this wine’s texture, that is, how it feels in the mouth, on the tongue and palate. It’s easy for reviewers to toss off “dense and chewy texture” — and I am guilty too — rather than explain, or try to explain, how the wine actually feels. In this case, therefore, in terms of weight, the wine is neither heavy nor obvious; its size and substance do not demand attention — it helps that the alcohol content is “only” 14.1 percent — and there’s even something fleet or deft about the texture. This quality is aided, no doubt, by the brisk acidity that lends the wine liveliness and elan. To further note, however, there’s a quality to the texture that you feel as if you could roll on your tongue, an amalgam of powdery elements as if ground in a mortar, an alchemical transubstantiation of crushed gravel, exotic barks and dried flowers into form, dimension and body. Zowie!

It will be no surprise that I thought that the Two Angels Divinity 2006 was a terrific wine. It would be great with grilled red meat, game birds — think quail or pheasant — or pork chops. We drank it with cold leftover pizza and chocolate cake, but that’s another story. Excellent. About $25 and Worth a Search.

High Valley, by the way — you expect Barbara Stanwyck to come riding down the valley to stirring music — was approved as an American Viticultural Area (AVA) in 2005. It’s in the eastern part of Lake County, just north of Napa County, and encompasses about 15,000 acres, of which some 700 are planted to vines. These are high-elevation vineyards, extending up the hillsides to 3,000 feet. Probably the most familiar producer in High Valley is Shannon Ridge, and indeed, the grapes for Divinity 06 come from the Shannon Ridge Vineyards.

Above all, what amount of time do they intend for us to spend with a bottle of wine?

If you have been at the wine-writing game for a while, you have doubtless attended trade tastings where dozens, if not hundreds, of writers, retailers, restaurant wine managers and such flit from table to table sampling dozens, if not hundreds, of wines and spending about two minutes, tops, with each one. Now that’s the way we pros assess wines! Truly, though, one skill that writers and other wine-tasters must acquire is the ability to make these lightning (and enlightening) judgments; star-power tends to make itself known immediately. Sometime in the Fall of 2003, I was in New York to attend a mammoth tasting of the 2000 vintage from Bordeaux, an event conducted in a circus-like atmosphere of competition that amounted to desperation. It was like running a gantlet where people not only hit you but spit red wine on you. Fun! And even amid the many great wines on display that hectic, arduous afternoon, when I took one sniff and one sip of Chateau Pavie, it felt as if the heavens had opened and the secrets of gravity were revealed. (I guess Einstein already did that, but you know what I mean.) That’s the stunning effect of perfection, instantly perceived.

But wouldn’t it have been better to have a whole bottle of Ch. Pavie 2000 at dinner — yeah, right — and taste it throughout an evolution of an hour or so?

This theme arose last night during an autumnal meal of braised pork shank (with porcini mushrooms and prosciutto), sauteed potatoes and green beans with apples. LL and I shared duties: I did the pork shanks, which turned out to be fairly labor-intensive for a weeknight, and she did the potatoes and beans. Whatever the work involved, the shanks turned out to be a terrific dish, and the dinner altogether was filling and warming on a chilly evening

I took the opportunity to open three cabernet-based wines from California. I have been working for weeks — it feels like months — on a post called “Old School California Cabernets,” about, well, I think it’s up to 30 now, current releases of cabernets from wineries founded in 1980 or before. That’s enough examples that I may have to break the post into two parts so it won’t be too long and unwieldy. Anyway, this trio, one from Napa Valley and two from Alexander Valley — prices ranged from about $45 to $65 — felt bruisingly unfathomable when first encountered, but since we sat at dinner for more than an hour and went back to each wine many times, we had a chance to see how they evolved as they loosened and unfolded in the glass.

One of the Alexander Valley examples I summarily dismissed as “too typical, too much oak, too toasty.” Half an hour to 45 minutes later, however, the wine, while retaining an almost crisp oak character and formidable tannin, had opened beautifully, showing ravishing floral and spicy aspects and intense, ripe black fruit, all wound in vivid acidity. I went back to the wines the next morning and in terms of tannin, they were still hard as nails.

I wonder, though, if consumers who bought these wines and sat down to dinner with them would react the same way, or would they say something like, “Wow, pretty darn tannic,” and go about the business of eating and drinking and then in a few minutes say, “O.K., that’s smoothing out nicely,” and just leave it at that. I mean, it’s my chosen task to be an explicator of wine, just as when I taught English in college it was my task to explicate, say, a poem by Robert Frost — and when you think about it, both woods and wine can be “lovely, dark and deep” — but most wine-drinkers, I think, don’t conceive of wine as a beverage to be explicated, just consumed and enjoyed.

Would their enjoyment be greater if they paid more attention? It’s difficult to say. I spent 20 years writing about art and reviewing exhibitions for the newspaper where I worked, and I feel certain that my experience at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan is not the same as the experience of the thousands of people who traipse dutifully through the galleries. There are many levels of discernment and pleasure, in art or music or literature or wine. Knowledge and experience expand our range of discernment and pleasure, but such procedures are neither within the ken nor the desire of everyone.

Still, I would encourage my readers to spend more time with and expend a little more attention on the next bottle of wine they open. Give it a chance to open up and express its character and individuality, if it’s the sort of wine that manifests character and individuality. Not all wines do, nor is that their purpose. On the other hand, if you spend some time savoring a $12 cabernet and it turns out to have a surprising amount of nuance and dimension, then you have profited in pleasure and wisdom, and the wine has been allowed to do its job.

A. I signed on to Twitter because everyone said that I should use it as a marketing tool to bring traffic to this blog. More traffic may lead to more advertising. No, wait, make that some advertising, any advertising, at least something more than Google ads, which I assume that everyone regards as annoying to the point of invisibility. Those Google ads net me all of $100 annually. Whoa, bring up that Wells-Fargo armored truck now!

Q. And has Twitter brought you more traffic?

A. Not noticeably. Of course I only have 34 followers, so I guess it will take time, you know, slowly building the Irresistible Momentum of a Force of Nature.

Q. We notice that you aren’t following anyone on Twitter. Pour quoi?

A. I tried that for a few weeks, but found the suffocating inanity intolerable. It’s amazing what intelligent, college-educated people will reveal about themselves or the trivialities they so breathlessly report. It’s like reading a Freudian treatise on the madness of crowds via telegraph.

Q. On another subject, do you accept wine samples for review?

A. Let me say this about that. The whole reviewing apparatus — wine, books, music CDs (what’s left of them), household products — depends on review samples. Rare is the publication or writer who possesses the fiduciary prowess to afford paying for the items he or she reviews. Probably 80 percent of he wines I review come as samples from wineries, producers, importers and wholesalers; some of these are sent with prior notice, some I solicit, to fit into a particular theme or post, but most just arrive at the door. Another 10 percent I encounter at trade tastings or similar events, and the remaining five percent I buy.

Q. That being the case, would you state your policy about accepting samples and reviewing the wines for this blog?

A. Of course I will. Let’s practice full disclosure. As I said in the previous entry, yes, I accept wine samples for review, but I accept them on no assumption on the part of whoever sent the sample that I will give a positive review or even any review at all. While it gives me great joy to recommend wines to my readers and share my enthusiasm with them, I am obligated, both by conscience and professional considerations, to dole out negative notices when necessary. I also reserve the right to make fun of, parody or downright deride — without being a total asshole — press releases that are badly written, deficient, vain, pompous and utterly fantastical. You would be amazed how many press releases embody all of those fatal flaws.

Q. On another subject entirely, is it true that when you were a child in Rochester N.Y., you and your older brother were a Cossack-dancing team and you performed on local television?

A. Yes.

Cool question mark image from verticalmeasures.com. Cossack-dancing kid from Koeppel Family Archives.

I’ll admit that some Saturday mornings, I think, “Oh rats, do we have to drive downtown again this week?” Once we get there, however, it’s always fun browsing the stands, seeing friends, as we inevitably do, and buying produce, meat and seafood — driven up from the Gulf of Mexico the previous night — with the prospect of great meals to come. The fact that at the end of this month the MFM will close until next April is a sign that the growing season, with its waves of successive fruit and vegetables, is also at a close, and that the bounty of the last harvests will be followed by Winter’s dearth.

Now unless you are the sort of person endowed with the fiduciary prowess to say something like, “Let’s sit outside this afternoon. I’ll grab a bottle of Lynch Bages Blanc” — a wine I will admit not tasting for a decade or so — then you, like I, would bring something more modest to the table, in this case a bottle of El Coto Rioja Blanco 2008. This is not a great wine, and I think that anyone sipping from a glass of it would feel the same. It’s made from viura grapes, and not meaning to cast aspersions, this is a grape simply incapable of greatness. You could throw a lot of French oak at it, as some misguided producers are doing with the unsuspecting grüner veltliner grape in Austria, and the result would not be a great wine but merely an over-oaked, ponderous wine.

El Coto Rioja Blanco 2008 is, however, thoroughly enjoyable. Made completely in stainless steel, it’s taut and stony, moderately spicy in its general citrus-like nature, dry and crisp and with an almost haunting floral aspect. Fulfilling its purpose as a screened porch, late Summer afternoon, aperitif quaffer, it rates Good+, and there’s not a damned thing wrong with that. About $10, and appropriate for poolside, picnics, patios and such. Imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York.

Later for dinner, though, needing more character and presence, I opened the Sequoia Grove Chardonnay 2007, Carneros, Napa Valley. Here’s a chardonnay perfectly suited to our palates. Given a cool fermentation in stainless steel, the wine is transferred to French oak barrels, of which only 35 percent are new; the wine does not go through the malolactic process — in which sharp apple-like (“malic”) acid is transformed to smooth milk-like (“lactic”) acid — the result being a chardonnay that tastes like the grape, is lively and vibrant, and receives subtle and supple support from wood. The Sequoia Grove Chardonnay 2007 is bright and bold, with a lovely shape and texture, a sort of lushness permeated by crispness thing, as if you were biting into a peach and an apple at the same time. Classic flavors of pineapple and grapefruit reveal nuances of cloves and roasted hazelnuts, while the finish is sleek, resonant and slightly floral. Drink now through 2011 or ‘12 (well-stored). Excellent. About $28.

My point, lecteurs, semblables et freres, is not that one wine is better or worse than another wine but that a wine makes its place with a sense of purpose as well as accommodation. There’s room for compromise between the positions that (A.) you can drink any wine any time with any food you want to and that (B.) each wine created on God’s Green Earth matches with one exact and Platonic food or dish and no other. What’s important is a sense of proportion. When we look at a Dutch still-life painting — this is Breakfast Still Life with Blackberry Pie (1631) by Willem Claesz Heda — the glasses of wine depicted therein embody an astounding sense of authority and deliberation. This ideal, we think, this bride of quietness, is the only possible wine that could have found a place in this setting, among these glowing foods and burnished plates and utensils and glittering fabrics, and I defy you not to wish that you were there, in that painting, so you could try that wine, which would surely offer a form of transcendence.

We do not, however, as much as we might wish, live inside a Dutch still life painting, and in this imperfect world all we can hope for is a modicum of poise, the reasonableness to make choices based on our preferences and experiences, two qualities that feed from and strengthen each other. Are there truly no wrongs choices in choosing wine? Of course there are, but even wrong choices broaden our experience and help lead us to the right ones. Just don’t expect too much of wine — it’s only a beverage — but let it speak to you itself of its own virtues and let it find its own place.

“Breakfast Still Life with Blackberry Pie” hangs in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

The title of this post is the opening line of “Endymion,” a long mythological poem that John Keats wrote from April to December 1817, when he was 21 and 22 years old. It’s a nice sentiment: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” (He wrote “for ever.”) It’s not true, though, is it? The martini gets consumed and the crackers eaten. The writers whose poems and prose are featured in the current issue of Poetry will largely be forgotten, and the magazine will crumble to dust or be nibbled on by insects that enjoy the delicacy of dry paper. The blue Japanese bowl that holds the crackers? Who knows what will happen to it in the years and decades to come? Slipped from unsteady fingers to shatter on the travertine? Sold at an estate sale to adorn other lives and households?

No, Keats wised up quickly, and in April and May of 1819, the “Great Year” of his achievement, he wrote in “Ode on Melancholy” about “Beauty that must die;/And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu.” You see, “Veil’d Melancholy” is the twin of Beauty, because Beauty embodies the seeds of its own impermanence and decay; as Wallace Stevens expressed the concept more succinctly in the 20th Century: “Death is the mother of beauty.” Keats concludes the three-stanza poem with an interesting botanical metaphor; only the person “whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” will perceive the true glory and necessity of Melancholy. That image, which encompasses the tension of the grape skin, the muscular push of the tongue against it and the quenching splash of the juice, has always appealed to me for its sense of striving and pleasure and refreshment.

Keats was fond of vinous metaphors. The whole second stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in May 1819, consists of an extended description of a glass of wine (sorry, my blog program would not reproduce the stanza indentations):

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green.
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim …

Every time I taught this poem in the second semester of English survey, I would think, “Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth … a beaker full of the warm South … beaded bubbles winking at the brim … Man, I want a glass of that stuff right now!”

Keats knew, though, that however much pleasure wine confers, its intoxicating character is not the road to transcendence. If he merges with the nightingale, a symbol of immortality, he will “Not [be] charioted by Bacchus and his pards.” (In classical myth, Bacchus, the god of wine, was led in a chariot drawn by a team of leopards.) Keats knew that wine has limitations, chief among them being that, like Pleasure and Beauty, it is ephemeral; wine fades, falters, goes bad. This can happen overnight, or it can take decades, but happen it must.

We read all the time the phrase: “Wine is a living thing.” Friends, wine is not a living thing. A bottle of wine is mostly water with some portion of alcohol, say, 12 to 14 percent, and infinitesimally minute quantities of about 400 trace elements that lend wine its actual character. The fact that a few wines are intended to and in fact do develop and mature as they “age in the deep-delved earth” doesn’t make these wines “living things.” We’re talking about natural chemical processes, the sometimes slow interactions of oxygen with elements in the wine’s chemical composition. If you leave your hedge clippers out in the yard and it rains (especially if you leave them out in the yard for, oh, three weeks), the blades will rust. There’s an example of a natural transformative chemical process, but no one goes around asserting that his hedge clippers are a living thing. If wine were “a living thing” — notice that no one says, “Wine is alive” — it would probably contain, um, things that we wouldn’t want to drink.

What I’m saying is that we don’t have to subscribe to the (fairly harmless but annoying) myth that wine is a living thing in order to understand how glorious wine can be; wine’s potential nobility and power do not depend on that. Still, part of the greatness of a great wine lies in our knowledge that its power, its character, its awesome pleasure-giving capabilities are peculiarly finite. To taste a great wine is to anticipate its demise; that acknowledgment contributes to our understanding and appreciation. It’s the factor that makes being charioted by Bacchus and his pards a matter of such mixed joy and melancholy.

The sketch of John Keats was done by his friend Charles Brown on the Isle of Wight in July 1819, in the midst of the nine months during which Keats wrote his finest poems. National Portrait Gallery, London. Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne,” 1620-23, hangs in the National Gallery, London.