Somewhere in the middle pages of “1984,” Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.

Fifty years later, we live in a wine world where, for the first time, there are wines that do taste like blackberry jam and are instantly intoxicating, or nearly so, and how these wines came into being is the subject of a new book, “Noble Rot” (Norton; $24.95), by William Echikson. The book tells the story of the wine life of the Bordeaux region of France over the past twenty years, and, though Echikson does not quite have the narrative skills to assemble it, he lays out all the pieces of a first-class Henry James comedy about the brutality of American innocence, the helplessness of French sophistication, and the need for intoxicants that are always called by some other name and claimed for some other purpose.

“Wine,” Saul Steinberg once said, “is the only thing that makes us happy as adults for no reason.” Wine books, on the other hand, find a hundred ways of making us unhappy for lots of reasons. The space between what the wine writers say and what the wine novice tastes is a standard subject of satire. (The best was written, exactly contemporary with Orwell, by Stephen Potter in the “Winemanship” section of his peerless “Lifemanship” books.) But some of the wine-writing weakness is more complex. Being an expert on wine and writing about it is what the English call “naff,” embarrassing and uncool, while being a non-expert on wine and writing about it anyway sounds merely boozy. No subject produces a literature so anxious, expressed not so much in its grandiosity as in its defensive jokiness and regular-guydom. A book on wine will always begin with the assurance that it is not like all those other books on wine, even though all those other books on wine begin by saying that they’re not like those other books on wine, either.

Echikson is no exception, and includes a lot of normal-person-like-you, let’s-demystify-this-stuff talk. But he also embarks on some absorbing storytelling, in a form now familiar from ten years of the little-thing/big-thing books: take a micro-history of something or other (cod, salt, the color mauve) and turn it into a macro-history of something else that provides, in parable, a mega-history of some larger third thing. Echikson’s micro-history is that of Château d’Yquem, the Bordeaux château that makes the greatest sweet white wine in the world and that, in the past decade, passed from private hands into those of a conglomerate. (“Noble rot” is the term of art for the mold that settles occasionally on some Sémillon grapes and makes them sweeter.) His macro-history is that of the wine region of Bordeaux generally, which also got transformed, though for different reasons, and ended up making bigger, stronger, fatter blackberry-jammish wines. His mega-story is the canonical one of backward France and forward America.

Echikson’s approach lands him with a problem that he never really solves: he is telling a big story about dry red wine through the vehicle of the small story of a sweet white wine. While, as a writer, Echikson is not a man who, seeing a cliché go winking by, can easily resist its charms—Gallic tempers rise, tensions flare at the top end of the market, and a golden world of the past seems lost, and that’s all one page of the preface—he has the crucial journalist’s knack for getting the confidence of people who ought to be wary of talking to him. (And who now are sorry they did: he is being sued for defamation in France.)

The story opens in the early nineteen-seventies, when the cult of claret—well-aged Bordeaux wine—was locked in place, especially in England, which dominated the wine trade as the Germans had earlier dominated the champagne trade. Bordeaux produced hard, tannic wines that often took a decade to be good to drink. (Then they were really good to drink.) Even when they weren’t good, though, everyone went on drinking them, because they were claret. The best wines, if far from cheap, were available, not collector’s items: anyone with a taste for wine could expect to drink Château Margaux or Château Cheval Blanc more than once in a lifetime, and the lesser grands crus were there for everyday drinking. The preëminence of French wines was simply taken for granted, like the skills of Jewish internists. Within Bordeaux, the classification of 1855—which had fixed the vineyards in a hierarchy of first-, second-, and third-growth classes—still hummed along, dominating everything.

Into this story come two new forces: Japanese money and American numbers. In the mid-seventies, the Japanese developed a taste for expensive French wine, and for buying the big names. This vastly expanded the market and seemed to justify investment in high yields, more grapes, and more land. But it was, as Echikson might put it, a poisoned chalice. It meant that the lower reaches of second- and third-growth wine were now, of necessity, being drunk by Americans in a less equable and accepting mood. In 1976, in Paris, an American Cabernet beat the French Bordeaux in a blind tasting. This was not quite the event that it has since come to seem—to the French winemakers, it was more like an American loss to the Lithuanians in basketball, wrong game at the wrong time—but it did mark a trembling of the earth beneath their feet.

More significant, a lawyer named Robert Parker, from the suburbs of Baltimore, began to mimeograph, and then publish, his own newsletter, The Wine Advocate, listing all the châteaux and grading them on a hundred-point system. His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine-writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numerical system. Not since Bernard Berenson made his lists of true and false Italian pictures had an American expert on the arts so fundamentally changed the economics of European culture. As with Berenson, what mattered was not so much that the list was right—who could tell for sure?—as that the list existed.

In retrospect, it seems that Parker was doing to wine what Bill James was doing to baseball in the same years, and in the same way. Both Parker and James began, in the late seventies, as unknown amateurs with privately printed newsletters, rapidly found a hungry and enthusiastic audience, and by the mid-eighties had become the reigning authorities among people impatient with the old wisdoms. Both were uncannily successful because they were apostles of a radical American empiricism—an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you. James was weakly predictive, but brilliantly analytic: his explanations of why things had happened were mesmerizing and convincing, but his guesses about what would happen next were often wrong. (His system had the Brewers winning the ’82 series.) Parker was weakly analytic but brilliantly predictive; he could never really explain why wines tasted good, but he claimed that the ’82 vintage was going to be great, and it was.