Arguably, McInerney and his literary compatriots -- Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, the usual suspects -- had arrived at precisely the best and worst time to be coronated as novelists. Best because more people were reading than ever before and because the baby boom was pushing its last members out into the book-buying population. And worst ... for the same reason. The reading public was changing, as was the culture itself. Writers, regardless of how talented or controversial, simply didn't rate magazine covers anymore.

Credit McInerney for figuring this out, and for (stealthily) finding a new line of work, one that he is probably better suited for than writing novels. For the past few years, he has contributed the "Uncorked" column for Condé Nast's House & Garden, and I won't be going out on any limbs if I maintain that, in doing so, he has become the best wine writer in America. "Bacchus & Me" bears this out, collecting no less than 48 uniformly witty and informative H&G pieces about all things viticultural, from French Champagne to the "wine goddess" of California's Napa Valley.

Even better, "Bacchus & Me" reveals, in ways that reading the columns in isolation can't, how McInerney has worked his old novelistic preoccupations into his writing about wine. You can see how this would restore some spring to his step. Rather than sitting around some apartment in New York, trying to bang out another 400-page novel that his critics would just murder anyway, McInerney was able jet off to Bordeaux and Piedmont in search of the '90s wine boom's fattest quarry. Along the way, he got Condé Nast to pick up the tab for his passion. (And believe me, his passion isn't cheap.)

There are other wine writers -- redoubtable Brits Jancis Robinson and Oz Clarke leap to mind -- who have managed to weave together fine writing, personal narrative and considerable knowledge with greater aplomb than McInerney does. But where Jay Mac surpasses them is in his sure-footed ability to enter a realm of luxury, rife with lively and tendentious personalities, and figure out who really matters. Most wine writers focus on the product first and attune themselves to the social burlesque, pick up the inside baseball, later. Not McInerney. It's not as if his tasting faculties aren't notable -- they are. (And if Lyons Press had included his concise notes in the collection, readers could see this.) It's just that they are secondary to his considerable ability to survey the vast sweep of European and American winemaking and suss out the genuine players.

For example, McInerney is a thoroughgoing, self-confessed Robert Parker Jr. acolyte. For the uninitiated, Parker is the single most powerful figure in wine, a Maryland lawyer and Ralph Nader devotee who in the late '70s began publishing the Wine Advocate, an ad-free newsletter that introduced Americans to his now-widespread 100-point rating scale, his belief that most wine critics are shills for the booze business and his controversial preference for big, fruit-forward wines. (A relatively low Parker rating -- a 75, say -- can ruin a wine, particularly an expensive premium wine from Bordeaux or California, and his critics complain that his preference for "large and in charge" vintages is producing a unidimensional international style of wine.)

McInerney has studied his Parker as closely as he once pondered the Manhattan social whirl. The master's ideology shapes Jay Mac's taste, something that only becomes obvious when one reads all the H&G articles in sequence. You could suggest that this means McInerney is a toady, but the truth is that he's merely efficient. By zooming in on Parker, he eliminated the need to slog through all those less important and less influential wine writers. This is vintage McInerney. He is not, after all, a guy who, when he chose to become a novelist, went off and studied with a slouching old coot at Podunk U. He chose Carver, who in the '80s was the most significant figure in American fiction.

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