The news that John and Dottie are to retire their “tastings” wine column in the Wall Street Journal (after 12 years in the cellar and 579 outings) ricocheted around the blogosphere at 300 000 Km/sec on Boxing Day. While it is not yet clear if the WSJ is saving space, cash or looking for some new blood, if the latter, I would submit Jay McInerney’s A Hedonist in the Cellar (Vintage, 2007) as an impressive CV for a candidate deserving of SA support. And this vintage, African cellar cred is surely fashionable inside the beltway.

Online lifestyle magazine Salon.com calls Jay “the best wine writer in America” and on the evidence supplied by this smorgasbord of fifty-odd wine columns for House & Garden magazine, I’m inclined to agree. The author of the novel that nailed the hedonistic excesses of eighties Manhattan, Bright Lights, Big City has turned wine columnist.

Jay describes himself as “a passionate amateur” who employs “a metaphoric language” in comparing wines to “actresses, rock bands, pop songs, painters or automobiles” rather than a “literal parsing of scents and tastes” à la Platter, the sighted wine guide that annually features in the list of SA non-fiction best sellers.

And it comes as a breath of fresh air to those heartily sick of “whiffs of cassia and wallops of capsicum” and other winespeak horrors to read of an Austrian Riesling described thus: “think of a samurai sword. Then imagine it simultaneously slicing a lime and a peach.” Although it’s a bit of a pompous stretch to equate it to the “precision and mystery of an early Charles Simic poem.”

Jayspeak has a definite louche flair dating back to his days as cocaine chronicler of the Reagan era. Takes his definition of botrytis, the beneficial fungus that desiccates grapes and produces the concentrated marvels of Sauternes: “not since Baudelaire smoked opium has corruption resulted in such beauty.” Or his rule of thumb for separating Burgundy from Bordeaux: “if it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.”

His bad boy past pops up in a column on Absinthe with the experience compared to “doing a couple of lines and a shot of tequila.” Still, it’s a turn up for the books when serial substance abusers reform and embrace establishment brands like Krug and Salon, although it helps to have a day job writing best sellers to pay the bills.

Indeed how strange to report that wine has replaced cocaine as the fashionable social poison of choice. If the evening kicks off with a generous sniff of the devil’s dandruff followed by triple Vodkas all round, where does the unfettered hedonist go next for a rush? To a bottle of Château Cheval-Blanc is the advice from this Brat Pack novelist who in his fifties has come to the sober realization that “any Cheval-Blanc that you can afford will reward your investment lavishly, and its pleasures will probably outlast your capacity to enjoy them.”

Which is a bit like finding out that Hunter S. Thompson became a tee-total vegetarian before the end or that Christie’s urbane wine supremo, Michael Broadbent, has a secret $1000-a-day crack habit.

SA’s own boffin of Burgundy, Anthony Hamilton Russell, counts him as a friend and recounts Jay cooking he and Mrs. HR, Olive, a perfect steak in his Manhattan apartment with F Scott Fitzgerald’s desk in the study, bought as a present by one of his many wives. Which is quite appropriate, given that Jay McInerney may be easily be mistaken for Jay Gatsby, the hero of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece the Great Gatsby, from his sharp dressing and hedonistic lifestyle, flying around the world to eat medieval Kyoto cuisine paired with vintage Dom Pérignon. And besides, in his documentation of the fashionable edge, Jay is the Fitzgerald de nos jours.

Wine “professionals” think he’s great: America’s über-palate, Robert Parker, calls him “brilliant, witty, comical and often shamelessly candid and provocative” while the UK’s first lady of wine, Jancis Robinson, raved about the hard-backed version of this Christmas stocking filler when it first came out back in 2006: “I have to admit that [it] is a rollicking read, and chimes even more with my own opinions than its predecessor Bacchus & Me. The boy can write as well as drink.”

And he certainly can, with his Hedonist prose studded with more paeans of praise to that “extremely snappy dresser” Mrs. Robinson than a Christmas pudding has raisins: “JR, the excessively modest and exceedingly attractive wine authority” or rephrased “although I found her dauntingly attractive, I was relieved that she was modest and unpedantic” is definitely the heroine of this collection of columns.

In fact their mutual admiration extends to his posting “what I drank on my 48th birthday” on “her excellent Web site” as well as including it here, twice. Just like the story of how he correctly identified a Château Haut-Brion ’82 blind in a Manhattan restaurant. Such an amazing feat, he tells it twice, perhaps because his hostess was an “Asian princess.”

For Jay has become the Truman Capote of the wine scene: a celebrity tonguemeister with forelock tugged to any passing celebrity or supertaster – Michel Chapoutier (a “diminutive and fiercely ambitious wine baron”), Olivier Humbrecht (“big enough to create his own weather”), Randall Grahm (a “posthippie who regularly gets his chi adjusted”) even rehabilitating some in the process, like the R20 000-a-day “superstar consultant” Michel Rolland, who is laughingly called a “Mondovino star.” Which for anyone who has actually seen the movie, is either deeply ironic, brilliantly cynical or just plain wrong.

When WOSA (Wines of SA, the exporters’ mouthpiece) flew a few high-profile Manhattan sommeliers to London for the Mega-Tasting in October, what a pity no business class (at least) air ticket was e-mailed to Mr. McInerney as well. For reading his column on SA reds, he surely needs some help. It kicks off with: “Nelson Mandela, Charlize Theron, and Pinotage are among South Africa’s distinctive contributions to global culture” even if the last named “can sometimes smell like nail polish remover au poivre.”

Anoraks will bristle to read that Kanonkop won France’s Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande trophy (which is actually a London wine competition award sponsored by a French grande dame who recently swapped a Château of the same name in Bordeaux for an über-bling cellar on the Simonsberg) while saying that Hamilton Russell Vineyards is “less than two miles from the Indian Ocean” confirms the American cliché of terminally confused geography.

I’ll take his word for it that proprietor Hammo is a “whirling dervish” on “dance floors from Cape Town to Manhattan.” Even if he is the second dervish to whirl into sight, after Michel Chapoutier and although Anglo American is indeed “Hydra headed”, the one that owns Vergelegen is not called Anglo American Industries. Unfortunate slips for someone who started out as a fact checker on New Yorker magazine until the fickle finger of fate snatched him up to a life of fame and first growth freebees. A calling a berth on the WSJ could only advance.

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