One night a few weeks back I was in the Italian Alps, having dinner, and I ordered a Barbera. It's not important which estate, as this isn't about wineries, but rather wine, and why we like it, and how it acts on us. Speaking no Italian (or actually about as much as did Otto in A Fish Called Wanda) I couldn't ask our server about the wine; I ordered it and it arrived. It was one of the big ones, 14% alc, broodingly dark and liberally dusted with new oak. I liked it quite a lot, in fact; it wore its high alcohol with unusual grace, it absorbed its oak into a blood-deep melange of vinosity, and I appreciated its smoky muscular wash of flavor.

The next night, in a different restaurant, I was able to ask for a Barbera "without oak", and be understood. This wine was really thrilling, every bit as "modern" and glossy as the wine before, but positively resplendent with fruit. All of its complexity derived from fruit - and it was seriously complex. I became aware my palate felt at ease, at home in this idiom, whereas the night before I enjoyed a visit elsewhere. This unoaked wine was not old-style, rustic, denuded of fruit and trying to make a virtue of it; no, it was almost absurdly extroverted and magnetic, it was somehow happy complete, realized.

I considered my own response. I liked the oaky wine, remember, but this one spoke my native language. I like to hear what the grape did and what the soil did. I am not especially interested in what the person did. Except when the person also likes to hear what the grape did and the soil did, and stays out of the way. I know there are temperaments who appreciate the engineering of wine, the "sculpting" or crafting, but I'm not one of them. I want to know about the thing itself. And I want to see it in its natural form, not face-lifted, pancake-madeup, boob-jobbed - anyone can "craft" a bombshell. But real beauties are made, ineluctably, by nature.

There are some who try to draw false battle-lines; we old-schoolers are accused of using terroir to excuse tired or indifferent winemaking, but that's foolish. I'm reasonably sure there is consensus among wine lovers that old vines, low yields and minimal manipulations create the most desirable wines. I'm not even opposed to oak per se; how could I be and still ship Vilmart? Oak is a good servant in good hands. But it is always a bad master.

It boils down to this: I prefer the what of the flavor to the how of the flavor. Great chefs take an ingredient - say a fistful of sweet-peas - and they think "How can I make this the sweet-pea-est sweet pea that ever was?" And we've all experienced that delightful shock when it feels like the first sweet-pea you ever tasted; it is saturated with reality. My issue is hardly with "modern" grape growing or vinification; my issue is with manipulation that creates distortion of the original thing. That first Barbera, by dint of its oak, was a half-step removed from its elemental self. It was entirely admirable and pleasure-giving, and by no means do I "disapprove" of it. But I noticed a sudden and unmistakable difference when I drank the unoaked Barbera; this was family. The other was an interesting and worthwhile stranger.

Karen Odessa and I spent some time hiking in Switzerland. Each night at dinner I intended to order Champagnes and Burgundies and all the usual vacation indulgences, and I kept getting ambushed by weird Swiss wines. Switzerland was so isolated until really the last 30-50 years, you still see many of their native varieties which grow nowhere else. Now here's a place where palate-paths diverge! I can well imagine someone saying "Whew; who needs this? Where's the Chardonnay?" and yet I was promptly ensnared by my own curiosity. Especially knowing the young generation of Swiss growers could easily choose to replant with internationally known grapes, but they've elected to express their identity with the likes of Petite Arvigne, Humagne, Cornalin and Amigne, among others. At the very least I wanted to know.

We also drank Muscat, and we drank a Valais Riesling piercingly vivid and intricate, about the level of Bründlmayer's Kamptaler Terassen, and we drank Syrah and Fendant and Pinot Noir, and they grow Marsanne and Silvaner and Viognier but we couldn't drink everything, though at times it seemed we tried.

The peak experience came with a grape called Amigne, which we saw in dry and sweet forms. After sussing this was a tres hip grape indeed, I learned to my dismay there are only 18 hectares in existence! Yet embedded in that dismay is a strange gladness; yet again a little orphan of the wine world turns out to have poetry in its nature. Here's a note for a wine called "Mitis", a 1999 dessert wine from a grower named Balavaud.

Tawny gold. Bouquet is a heady mix of wintergreen, hyssop, burnt straw, asian pear, and WILD wild strawberry. Palate is salty with perfect acids, Jurançon-like wild cherry, banana and kiwi, crenshaw melon and pine honey. Absolutely original, delicious and haunting.

18 hectares in the world, folks...

After having four different wines from Amigne, it struck me as a grape in the Auxerrois family, feinting also in the direction of Klevener (said to be a mutation of Savignan) or perhaps Gros Manseng. I gather it's a bitch to grow. I hope those 18 hectares will survive.

In Madagascar there's a lemur called an aye-aye, which is severely endangered. I hope the little guy makes it. Not because of the chance a cure for cancer might be discovered in its tear-ducts, but because of its wild brown eyes and long middle fingers and its kind of Sean Penn look about the face. Call me sentimental if you like. Nothing wrong with sentiment! But what really drives me is a ludicrous joy in the multiplicity of things, Amignes and aye-ayes and all the incomprehensible ways the earth can be beautiful. I'm less sentimental than I am greedy. I want to know them all.

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