Diving into amontillado is the equivalent of committing to a long, complicated novel. You may be surprised, even astounded by what you find. You will almost certainly be rewarded if you permit yourself to be challenged.

I feel as if I’ve learned something every time I’ve taken the plunge, though the first lesson always seems to be a rueful reminder of how little I actually know. That’s strange to say, as amontillado is one of the more familiar of the arcane wine terms. It’s been used for centuries to denote a particular style of sherry. Even schoolchildren have heard of it (that is, if schools have not completely forsaken Edgar Allan Poe in favor of more inclusive ghoulishness).

I say all this with a good deal of wonder, having recently tasted 18 amontillados with the wine panel. They were an astonishingly complex collection. The best bottles had fascinating tales to tell, but best of all was the collective story they revealed. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Ashley Santoro, wine director at the Standard East Village restaurants, and Talia Baiocchi, the editor in chief of Punch, an online drinks magazine, and author of “Sherry: A Modern Guide to the Wine World’s Best-Kept Secret,” to be published this fall by Ten Speed Press.

It’s important first to understand the basics of amontillado. Briefly, sherry comes in two fundamental forms: In the first, fino, the wine ages in barrels under flor, a yeast that forms on the surface of the wine, which both protects and gives it character. In the second, oloroso, the flor does not form. Instead, the sherry ages in contact with air, and this exposure to oxygen shapes its character.