A BOTTLE OF WINE.(The Talk of the Town)

The practice of drinking wine and then finding something to say about it has always had a certain national character. English wine writers, for example, are fusty and understated; Americans, democratic and exuberant (Europeans might say bombastic); and the French--need it be said?--have a penchant for lustily anthropomorphic descriptions that involve big-boned ladies and dancing girls.

But now that the American Robert Parker has become far and away the world's most influential wine critic, extending Yankee hegemony across Europe, the recent appearance in New York of Clive Coates, the sixty-two-year-old British Master of Wine, seemed extraordinary, like an encounter with a Kalahari Bushman.

Coates is the publisher and scribe of The Vine, a slim, elegant monthly volume of tasting notes and vineyard profiles. In a field characterized by effusiveness--"an explosive nose of dried herbs, ground pepper, new saddle leather, rose petals, black raspberries and cherries," as Parker wrote of a Zinfandel not long ago--The Vine is notable for its taut descriptions, in which the adjectives rarely get more florid than "ripe" or "classy," and the superlatives range from "good plus" to "very fine indeed."

The other day, at lunchtime, Coates sat in his stocking feet at the kitchen table of a friend's apartment on the Upper East Side, flanked by a bottle of Alsatian Riesling, a bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese, and a jar of Marmite, which he never travels without. Coates has a mandarin's high, arched brows, heavy-lidded eyes, and a voluminous belly. If a wine or a thought pleases him, he will cradle his belly in both hands and rub it.

After more than four decades of driving around the winemaking regions of the world in rented cars, stopping in at little farmhouses and grand chateaus, and often tasting wine "from eight in the morning to eight at night," Coates is winding down. He now plans to focus almost exclusively on French wines. He has just moved from London to a village in the hills of the Maconnais called, fittingly, Saint-Bonnet-de-Vielle-Vigne, where he has bought a small house with a view of river and forest. "I ...