By cutting out all those middlemen, Rimmerman could offer lower prices at higher profit margins, while becoming the “Sub Pop Records of the wine trade,” scouting talent and connecting old-school vintners to discriminating consumers. He could also be “the Erin Brockovich of the wine trade,” pointing out that pesticides have been found in bottled wines at every price point including world famous Bordeaux. In addition, many wineries use additives and processing agents like egg whites, milk, fish extract, animal gelatin (sorry, vegetarians), sugar, toasted oak powder, the color-enhancer Mega Purple and dimethyl dicarbonate, a chemical so toxic that merely inhaling it can be fatal. Bringing attention to all this, and to little guys doing it the old-fashioned way, Rimmerman appeals to the moral and intellectual vanity of his subscribers before even mentioning anything as tawdry as the per-bottle price. Only a chump would buy top-dollar status-symbol wines secretly saturated with chemicals instead of the far-cheaper real stuff favored by true insiders.

Rimmerman is neither the first nor the only wine merchant to have built a brand identity around the distinction between industrial and artisanal winemaking. Kermit Lynch, for example, a minor legend in the international wine trade from Berkeley, Calif., who says he has never heard of Rimmerman, has been importing French wines of this stripe since the 1970s. Then there is Chambers Street Wines, a brick-and-mortar retail shop in Manhattan that makes a comparable commitment to selling noninterventionist wines.

But Rimmerman has discovered some of the great noninterventionist standard-bearers, like Frank Cornelissen, who was toiling in obscurity high above the snow line on Sicily’s volcanic Mount Etna, before Rimmerman found him resurrecting abandoned vineyards and vinifying the juice in the strictest of Old World methods. According to Alder Yarrow, a Garagiste fan and author of the influential wine blog Vinography: “Cornelissen just takes a bunch of grapes, throws them in buckets, stomps them, comes back six months later and puts it in bottles. They are the most natural wines in the world.” The result is cloudy with visible sediment, and even prone to refermenting in the bottle. “But when they are good, they are unbelievable!” Yarrow says. “Rimmerman likes that kind of thing, wines that to most Americans are like eeuwee!”

Of all the purported nicknames Rimmerman offers, the most telling may be “the Great and Powerful Vinous Oz” — celebrating, as it does, a certain Emerald City quality in Garagiste. Rimmerman has doubtless traveled around the world seeking great wine, but he also appears to find at least some through traditional distributors and importers — one of whom, asking to remain anonymous because he does business with Rimmerman, explained that Garagiste can be a convenient way to move a lot of inventory in a big hurry.

Alice Feiring, a New York-based wine writer, claims that Rimmerman has even discovered wines through her blog posts. (Rimmerman, who considers Feiring a fellow traveler, insists the timing of their discovery was merely coincidental.) “He’s not a tastemaker,” she says. “He is picking up on a trend. He is a businessman.” Feiring adds, however, that she knows “people who are very, very, very faithful to him, and give him a lot of money all the time.” Other industry insiders have told me similar things, raising one of the greater curiosities of the Garagiste phenomenon: Rimmerman’s act seems to appeal most powerfully to people with no illusion about how it works. David Schildknecht, for example — one of the most prominent wine writers in the world and a critic for The Wine Advocate, and therefore a man deluged with free wine samples — chuckled over the phone, saying: “I buy wine from him regularly. . . . .It’s pretty amusing to me.” Michael Terrien, a boutique Napa winemaker, calls Rimmerman’s daily e-mails “wine crack,” adding that he has to unsubscribe periodically to stop the financial hemorrhage.

Rimmerman’s personal theory about how it all works — how the Garagiste business model and those idiosyncratic e-mails compel such vigorous spending — fetishizes the human element, the obvious imperfections, like telling his administrative assistant to leave typos and grammatical errors in his e-mail offers — preserving the immediacy of his writing — and never including photographs. “Psychologically, it’s very important,” he says. “If I told you that story but you didn’t like the look of the label” — Animale’s cat, say — you might doubt the pitch. (“This is something I’ve carried for 18 years,” Rimmerman told me, as if confessing a terrible secret. “I’ve never told anybody this.”) He also cites a broader cultural shift working in his favor — “It’s almost like ‘everything old is new again,’ ” he wrote in a personal e-mail to me. “Or the music scene going back to turntables or . . . vintage 1960s tube amplifiers — people crave warmth, whether its auditory or in business, and eventually they come around to what makes them feel good, what keeps them warm — sensory or mentally.”

This idea of analog musical warmth is central to his thinking. In Walla Walla, Wash., after a long morning among the giant grain silos, vast wheat fields, not-so-vast vineyards, and smelly horse corrals of the area’s rural fringes, we stopped at the relatively elegant Waters Winery. Jamie Brown, a vintner who made a living selling bootleg concert CDs during the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s, is now a sort of Falstaffian rocker/poet/artiste who has sold many wines through Rimmerman. Inside the barrel-aging chamber, Rimmerman tasted multiple vintages of Waters syrah and cabernet, free-associating toward a sales pitch: “This is cabernet sauvignon for cabernet sauvignon’s sake . . . not for oak’s influence, Napa Valley, prestige, Robert Parker.” He spat into a floor drain and took a second stab: “This is the Old World that has come to America. This is like Ellis Island in Washington State. How about that for a quote? That’s a big thing for me to say, because I’ve never found that anywhere.”