A 20-year-old work is now my favorite book about wine. I just finished Kermit Lynch’s “Adventures on a Wine Route,” and it is a compelling read, eerily relevant even today.

A chronicle of Lynch’s years of buying wine around France, dealing with an amazing array of thoroughly Gallic (and sometimes galling) characters, it’s engaging and edifying throughout.

Reading it was made all the richer by my having had the chance to interview Lynch, an importer, wholesaler and retailer, in his Berkeley, Calif., store in February. We chatted for an hour about wine and life, then continued the discourse for another couple hours at his favorite restaurant, Chez Panisse.

Highly opinionated but thoroughly gentle and even genteel in his delivery, Lynch is as fresh and textured as the breads from the Acme bakery next door to his store. I’m still transcribing the interview, and will write more about it and the book in future posts, but wanted to share a few Lynchian thoughts, which invariably are also food for thought.

On point ratings for wine: “No person can impose his taste on another person’s. Ratings are useful only to sort out the bad wines: This is flawed, this is reduced. … But then you have this point system. Well, here’s this muscadet, it’s flawless, it’s perfect. That’s a 100-pointer. It’s not a Meursault, but it’s perfect. But it will never get 100 points because it’s a muscadet.”

On the movie “Mondovino”: They made [renowned wine consultant] Michel Rolland into a clown. I’ve been buying wine from Michel since before he became an enoloogist. He’s a great joker, and I can see him in the back of that limousine making fun of that guy [director Jonathan Nossiter]. The way they edited it completely perverted Michel.”

*On his palate: “There are two things I hate: aggressive wines that attack your palate, and oak splinters.”

*On backlash against his (mostly French) portfoloio: “When the war in Iraq started, I had three distributors call and say they didn’t want any French wines, and I had three others call and say they wanted to start buying French wines [chuckles]. We’ve always had this patriotic strain. I was just watching a movie from the late 1940s about World War II. It had all the usual stuff, the montage of the storm troopers, the newspapers. The next scene is in this totally funky New York diner. The chef comes out with a cigar in his mouth and reaches up to a board where it says ‘Sauerkraut.’ He marks it out and writes ‘Freedom Cabbage.’ ”

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

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