A few years ago – which, if memory serves me, corresponds to "the Paleolithic era" when you're young – jaws dropped all around the oenophilic community when Jay McInerney was named wine columnist for House and Garden magazine.

McInerney has been considered something of a voice of a generation (read: mine), but I always thought he was unfairly freighted with mis-perceptions and even some guttersniping: a talented writer who writes about the social milieu can be misunderstood as having an attitude, and even if they do, it is the writing that should, and ultimately does, speak for itself.

It seems that many among the cigars-and-snifters crowd dismissed McInerney's wine writing as disdainfully as they would a box of Franzia, while many among the hipster-wine-bar set dismissed McInerney's wine writing as cloyingly as they would embrace the "irony" of that selfsame box of wine. But anyone so dismissing often so dismissed for no better reason than the fashion of scorning the 1980s, a critical posture that the decade itself certainly bears some responsibility for. I've actually read one reference to this best-selling – and, to my mind both as reader and writer, very talented – author as a "wine brat."

However and fortunately, there's a happy medium that neither over-expounds on the Religion of Wine out of pomposity nor underserves it out of youthful cool. It is this territory that McInerney travels in A Hedonist in the Wine Cellar, the second of two published collections of his wine writing for House and Garden and representing, one supposes, the writer's settling well into satisfying the demands of his new area of content. The magazine, by the way, is now defunct, so let us be doubly grateful that McInerney's writing for it has been collected in these two volumes.

McInerney tells us right off that he never intended to write about wine as a trained wine expert, but rather as an accomplished observer of the contemporary scene who has a palate and some talent accompanying therewith. Left for the reader to extrapolate is that this is not the worst approach: in fact, considering how weighty wine writing can get, there is definitely an audience among whom it is appreciated. And though this isn't madness there is a method to it: wine, after all, is meant to be shared, enjoyed, used to commemorate, and writing about the sensual pleasures of it from a sensualist's point of view is not only appropriate but artful.

So the argument, when there is one, is really between aesthetes who fall on either of the self-appointed sides of academic tweed or artistic velvet. And in having the argument they miss the point, which is a) enjoying and b) being informed about the wine. And here, McInerney triumphs. In Hedonist, the M.O. is to write about a specific wine variety, varietal, grape, region or producer, with information and impressions on relevant vintners, history, and science, wrapping up with suggestions for good bottles and their pairings, depending on what applies. At the end of the piece, the reader has had their mental and sensual appetites stimulated. The reader also often has some suggestions of which bottles to score at the local wine store with the important distinction that McInerney never tries to sell the cheap stuff or the expensive, just the good. So if, for example, you want to know what are some good ten dollar bottles of California Chardonnay, you will only get that if he thinks there are any. If, on the other hand, you want to know what bottles among the California Chardonnays are the best, that you will get, along with some transporting writing about how and why.

About that writing: how could anyone fault writing that describes the Soave Bolla warehouse as a "retro-futuristic vision from the animators of the Powerpuff Girls" (page 23), describes a hybrid of two French grapes as "the love child of Jean Seberg and Congressman Bob Barr" (page 54) and then pivots to describing the resulting wine's aroma as "nail polish remover au poivre" (ibid). He doesn't shy from the food writing, tackling, for example "the thorniest food and wine question ever" (page 107): what wine pairs well with asparagus? Read the essay if you want the answer.

McInerney's essays are both educated and sensual, and if that's the not the perfect symbol for wine appreciation then what is? Once you've slogged through enough academic wine manuals, charts, lectures and sermons, you appreciate the hedonist's approach. It reflects the vintner's art: yes, there is the science of wine (which ranges from botany to geology to meteorology) but there is also the aesthetic. There are the grapes, there is the soil, there is the sun and there is the rain -- and then there is what winds up in the bottle, the glass, the mouth and the memory.