Wine

When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price. Using brain scanners to monitor the minds of wine drinkers, scientists found that people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more. The study, reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated for the first time how marketing tactics -- such as raising the price of a product -- can cause the brain to play tricks on itself.

IN the glass, Pinot Gris is anything but "gray" -- it's sort of a golden green, pea-tendril-shot-with-sunlight color -- but when you bring it to your nose, you might feel a little lost at first. In the best Pinot Gris there is often an evocative, between-the-cracks quality to the aromatics that makes them hard to grasp. Is it pear you smell? Not quite. Apple? Yes -- and no. Does it smell sweet? Maybe, but only the way freshly baked bread does, which is almost savory.

The Perrin brothers, who own the Chateauneuf-du-Pape estate Chateau de Beaucastel, are very much stars of the appellation. But as prices for Chateauneuf creep upward, it pays to look at the brothers' Coudoulet de Beaucastel, especially in the terrific 2005 vintage. The Coudoulet vineyard is just outside the borders of the appellation, so it qualifies only as Cotes-du-Rhone. But what a Cotes-du-Rhone!

AS sure as there are flowers in April, a new crop of white wines from every corner of the world makes it to your dining room table each spring. This year, more than ever, they'll arrive with an almost palpable pulsing energy, limpid and clean, having been aged in steel tanks rather than oak barrels.

THREE recently published books suggest that an emerging literary form, the wine memoir, is gathering momentum. Each book -- Alice Feiring's "The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World From Parkerization," Neal I. Rosenthal's "Reflections of a Wine Merchant" and Sergio Esposito's "Passion on the Vine" -- recounts a life or a wine-soaked slice of a life, and in each case wine is more than just a leitmotif.

Rick Moshin has a thing for Pinot Noir, and the family-owned Moshin Vineyards is pretty much a full-on Pinot Noir facility. One of his best is this 2006 Pinot from the Russian River. It's smooth, dark and delicious with flavors of cherries, blackberries and earth. By rights, for a Pinot Noir of this quality, the bottle should cost a lot more than it does. Chill it down a little before serving in this weather; it will warm up soon enough.

THE CROWD at the Echoplex is cheerful and chatty, but as they sip an elegant French Gewurztraminer infused with "subtle tones of honey, grapefruit and tropical fruit" (or so says Wine Spectator), their ersatz sommelier, Julian Davies, slugs down a distinctly pedestrian bottle of Red Stripe Jamaican ale. This curated eclecticism is par for the course at Irregular Wine Tasting, where an Italian Cabernet Sauvignon might be followed by a milky junmai sake.

HERE'S THE thing about roses and me: I buy them by the case. With other wines, maybe I'll buy a couple of bottles -- one to drink, one to stick away -- and if I really like them, I'll think about picking up a few more. It's a considered, rational purchase. But who can be rational about rose? At any time during the summer I'll have one bottle open in the fridge, ready for me to pour a glass or two for dinner. There'll be another bottle chilling, because who wants to run out of rose?

My parents weren't really wine drinkers, more your classic martini types, but for holiday dinners they -- and any guests -- drank wine. For me, as a kid and later a teenager, setting out the wineglasses used only at Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed almost ceremonial. Since my mom and dad didn't know a thing about wine, I took on the job of deciding what they should buy.

In most years, store manager Diana Hirst considers herself lucky if she can snag six bottles of $265 Araujo Napa Valley cult Cabernet Sauvignon to stock in her Costa Mesa wine shop. This year she can get dozens -- a sign of how the Wall Street meltdown is rippling across the alluvial fields of Napa Valley to the chalky limestone vineyards of Champagne in France. Sales of high-end wine are plummeting, wine merchants say, and once-rationed top California Cabernets are in ample supply.