GREAT wine writing is extraordinarily rare. Ovid, A. J. Liebling, Marcus Aurelius -- that about does it (depending where you stand on Rabelais). Enough only for one of those famous thin books like ''The Battlefield Victories of Charles de Gaulle'' or ''The Joy of Irish Sex.'' Lawrence Osborne is undaunted, however; he sets out to make ''Great Wine Writing'' a good deal thicker.
Osborne, a journalist whose previous books include ''Paris Dreambook'' and ''American Normal,'' embarks on an oeno-odyssey through several major regions of wine production (Napa, Bordeaux, Piedmont) and others not so celebrated (Languedoc, Lazio, Puglia). He drinks heartily with wine producers in each place. He presents himself as a wine naïf, brought up in a wine-hostile environment (the Home Counties of England). His quest is to discover what good taste in wine really means, and whether he has any himself.
Pretty straightforward. But no sooner is Osborne tippling with his first wine producer (Antonio Terni of Le Terrazze in the Italian Marches) than the conversation dives into the thorny question of ''terroir'' (literally ''land''). ''Terroirists,'' as their opponents call them, believe that soil and microclimate are the chief determining factors of a wine's quality. On the other side are those who think that grape varieties and what's done in the winery are the crucial elements. These wines, Terni says, are ''like airport architecture''; they have ''a sort of nowhereness.'' Italians call such wines internazionale, which is a polite way of saying ''big, fruity stuff that Americans like.'' Terni is proud to make both kinds. He adds, ''I do hate all this pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation about wine.''
Long pause. So our wine naïf is familiar with the better wines of an obscure Italian region best known for an undistinguished plonk called Verdicchio? He can hold his own in a debate that's been roiling the wine world for years? And what's this about one kind of wine for Europeans and another for Americans? Is wine An Issue? As in the widening culture gap between America and Europe? And what does that ''mental masturbation'' crack mean? Isn't being able to judge wine the sine qua non of a thoroughly modern sophisticate? Perhaps these are deeper waters than we expect.
The suspicion grows as ''The Accidental Connoisseur'' rolls on. It becomes clear that Osborne not only knows a great deal about wine, but cares about it a great deal too. And he has a wicked ear. Osborne's encounters are often priceless. There are the episcopal vacuities of Robert Mondavi, quoting Petronius, agreeing that he has single-handedly ''Europeanized California,'' yet unfavorably comparing an Échézeaux from the Côte d'Or with his own pinot noir. There's the suave Tuscan cynicism of the Marchese Antinori, the bland arrogance of the Big-Châteaux Bordelais, the techno-ravings of the Sonoman marketer Leo McCloskey, with his digitalized cellars and the ''engineering specs'' of Château Lafite. ''I tell you,'' McCloskey says of the crazy things his competitors do, ''it's a struggle to keep things real.''
Osborne's harmless, bumbling persona allows him to make the required genuflections to the mighty of the wine world, while encouraging them to pontificate themselves into very deep holes. It also lets him say with impunity far from complimentary things about overrated wines like Mondavi's Opus One and Antinori's Tignanello. But he's not just having fun. The same innocent abroad in the wine world elicits confidences that subjects might not share with someone more aggressive. California's premier wine maverick, Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is uncharacteristically wistful: ''I wish we had terroir,'' he says of American wines. ''But we don't. I'd like to make a terroir wine before I die.''
Brooding over Osborne's adventure like an implacable Greek god -- the anti-Dionysus, perhaps -- is the ''all-powerful'' American wine critic Robert Parker, who sees himself as the Ralph Nader of wine, the incorruptible gatekeeper of the American palate.
Wherever Osborne goes, Parker looms in the background. In Northern California he's a force as reliable as the laws of physics. In France and Italy, where Osborne's heart really belongs (despite some dutiful anti-anti-Americanism), Parker is seen as a tyrant, a man with ''grotesque'' methodology and a guru (not a compliment in France, where it has a distinct whiff of Jim Jones). What drives Europeans craziest are Parker's famous scores, which over here are his chief claim to fame; more so than his unreadable wine reviews, with their bizarre olfactory images. Osborne observes that for Parker wines can taste of ''melted asphalt,'' ''crushed seashells'' and ''concentrated meat essences.'' These are all adulatory terms.
In his best chapter, ''An Idea of France,'' Osborne weaves together the love-hate relationship between France and America and Parker's embodiment of it, paying the necessary obeisance to the man he calls The Nose while subtly signaling his skepticism about Parker's Brobdingnagian faculties.
In the second part of his book, Osborne concentrates on French and Italian winemakers who are small, creative, fiercely independent and resistant to ''international'' pressures. Just as our wine naïf is actually a passionate amateur (in the classic sense of ''lover''), his journey is really a sequence of encounters that gently build a case about what makes wine good. And because part of his case is to have found international mega-wines wanting, and since their most energetic advocate is Robert Parker, this is also a low-key argument against the increasing global homogeneity imposed by Parker's vast influence.
OSBORNE is too shrewd to put this point of view in a European mouth, where it could be dismissed as, well, sour grapes. It falls instead to the New York wine importer Neal Rosenthal, whom Osborne calls ''the American wine world's fiercest and most articulate iconoclast.'' Rosenthal is a powerful presence in this book and has much to say about the difficult but essential balance between technology and tradition, the necessary ''biodiversity'' of wines, all of it in revolt against the forces that, justly or not, Parker has come to represent.
''The Accidental Connoisseur'' is a vital book for those who care about wine; who find hyperventilated discussions of microscopic differences between hundreds of essentially identical wines to be little more than scholastic quibbling about how many angels can dance on the top of a cork; who see the quasi religion that raises wine to the status of a Holy Grail promising ineffable pleasure to be in reality a mercenary and joyless cult, which stuffs the mad delights of Dionysus into a neo-Puritan brown bag.
Osborne is a new voice in the wine world, smart, generous, perceptive, funny, sensible, free of cant and arrogance and self-interest. It's about time. ''Great Wine Writing'' just got a good deal thicker.
