Kermit Lynch, the finest wine importer in the nation, is a marvelous conundrum. He is a Californian – his wine-selling office is in Berkeley – whose wares are not just mainly French, but selected from producers whose style is utterly remote from that of the bulk of wine produced on his home turf. Both the California white and red tend to be mass-produced, one-dimensional, aggressively appealing things that don’t age in a compelling fashion – even the most expensive bottles. (“Fruit bombs” is one good term for them.)

The wines Mr. Lynch has spent decades scouring the French countryside for are nearly all made in small quantities by artisans without machines to help in the backbreaking grape-picking process or in the cellar after the fruit has been harvested. These wines tend to be tannic and in need of cellaring – and not just the reds.

Mr. Lynch’s way of looking at wine involves delayed gratification. He loves deeply the wines of the Rhone Valley, where the syrah grape dominates, and with it a style of heavier wines. When produced by the small growers using their age-old techniques, even the cheaper bottles of syrah can age for 10 to 20 years. Syrah grown anywhere else – not just in California – doesn’t have the ability of its Rhone Valley counterparts to age and develop the smells of the ground and brush and flowers of the region.

“Inspiring Thirst” (Ten Speed, 400 pages, $40) collects pieces from the monthly newsletter Mr. Lynch has issued since he started his wine shop in 1972.This old wine buyer found it fun to note how cheaply bottles by my favorite producers from Cornas (an appellation in the northern Rhone Valley) went for in the 1970s. But there’s more to this book than the rueful pleasure of lost buying opportunities. “Inspiring Thirst” has recipes appropriate for the wines. There’s a fine piece about the issue of Burgundy vintages – another area Mr. Lynch deals with – where buying can be expensive and hit-or-miss. There are memorials for departed winemakers: Lucien Peyraud of Bandol’s Domaine Tempier; Robert Jasmin of Cote Rotie, and Richard Olney, wine expert, author, and friend.

There’s something by fiction writer Jim Harrison – Gigondas and Bandol fanatic, he – who, after being forced to go outdoors of a San Francisco restaurant to have a smoke, was met by “the welcoming frowns of a passel of dweebs doing Tai Chi.” There are two amusing pieces purporting to be memoirs. (One, “Do the Condrieu: From the Memoirs of Madame de Viognier,” refers to the appellation of Condrieu, where one of the world’s costliest whites is made from the fickle viognier grape.) There are entertaining accounts of heroic eating and drinking, often over a period of days.

Then there are the tasting reports of old wines. At a late 1980s visit to Gerard Chave – his family has been making wine in the Rhone Valley since 1481 – the host opened a white and a red Hermitage from 1929. In 1998, Mr. Lynch had a 1957 Bandol at Domaine Tempier. Then there was the 24-year-old Mont Redon Chateauneuf-du-Pape he had at a private London club or the 45-year-old Grand Cru Chablis Moutonne. As I mutter “lucky bastard,” I remember what I owe Mr. Lynch: How hard he labored to bring here the wines he himself so passionately loves and how many nights he must have lay awake worrying if his undertaking might spell financial doom.

Contrasted to the serviceable prose of ex-lawyer Robert “A blockbuster of a wine” Parker, Mr. Lynch’s prose can sparkle: “When the sun sets you can see light glowing from the leaves. It is poetry, and true.” Referring to an out-of-doors meal at Domaine Tempier: “That may be as close as I will ever be to an awareness of cosmic unity and harmony.” Yet the best thing in “Inspiring Taste” is the humor. Discussing the “miracle”of Cornas – in which I concur – Mr. Lynch refers to his two favorite Cornas makers, Clape and Verset, as the “twin peaks” of “Corni.” (There’s a photo of 80-some-year-old Verset bedecked with wine medals with the caption: “Noel Verset, ready to rock!”)

Elsewhere Mr. Lynch notes, “I can assure you that 1982 is incontestably the finest Bordeaux vintage since 1981.” On the same subject: “I will go even further:

1989 is the vintage of the past fourteen centuries!” One wine Mr. Lynch claims to have “tasted triple blind in a one-man submarine having foregone conjugal relations for 100 hours.” Mr. Lynch likens wines to a penguin, a handsome middle-aged man, someone you might consider marrying, a jogging quail, classical music, and an Alfa Romeo. Regarding government warnings on bottles that wine may cause health problems, Mr. Lynch writes: “Scissors may cause bleeding. Water may cause drowning. Life may cause death. Music may cause Muzak.” One wine is “a bit like its maker, Monsieur Vachet, a little cold and reticent on first meeting, but it grows on you.”

All said, to use Robert Parker word, a “blockbuster” of a book.

Mr.Richman last wrote for these pages about rock lyrics.