In his elegant and occasionally very funny book about Bollinger, the British writer Cyril Ray relates a story about how champagne became known as “the boy” in late-Victorian England. According to Ray, it began at a summer shooting party; the not-yet-corpulent Edward VII, Prince of Wales (at left), insisted on the presence of a lad with a wheelbarrow full of bubbly packed in ice. It was a hot day, and the thirsty prince hollered “boy!” so many times that the heavy swells in attendance—especially those who wanted it to be known that they’d been shooting with the heir to the throne—began to throw the epithet around. Some perverse toffs began to spell it “the bhoy.” It stuck for more than a half-century.

It can be difficult not to feel a little like the porcine Edward…

Like most adults who haven’t undergone a recent rhinoplasty or taken a vow of sobriety with a Jesuit order, I happen to adore champagne. Some of the most indelibly joyous moments in my drinking life have happened in its company. Its permutations—consumed with food or without, made both by negociant houses and small growers—only add to its savor. I’m perplexed, then, when I come across a journalist, or a merchant, disparaging one side or the other. In his always-entertaining catalog, farmer-fizz importer Terry Theise quotes François-Roland Billecart, of the respected small house Billecart-Salmon: “A small vigneron will occasionally make very good Champagne, but he won’t know why he did it.” A voluble advocate of grower champagnes, Theise swings back: “The crucial…

To keep learning about a thing is to realize, more and more, that one has barely grazed the surface. Getting to know wine is a trusty reminder of this niggling fact. In June, I stood in a vineyard on a hill called Nussberg and looked down at the Millennium Tower and the rest of  Vienna’s downtown. Vienna is the only urban area that includes an entire winemaking region within its boundaries, a fact that, at first, didn’t register as promising. After all, wine made in cities tends to be either a tourist novelty or a vanity beverage made by some overstimulated hotelier; the Viennese versions turned out to be neither. I had gone up the hill with Gerhard Lobner, the young winemaker at Mayer am Pfarrplatz and Rotes Haus, whose deservedly popular wines tasted brisk and charming, if not…