I think a lot about you. Where you are, what you want. What you really want. Besides revenge, I mean. What you want to enhance your wine buying, wine drinking, wine understanding, wine life here in Minnesota.

After a year's worth of thinking, I've concluded that what you really, really want is to be able to call me up from the liquor store, when you're standing in the aisles, and ask me what to buy. Unfortunately, your desires in this matter are directly at odds with my heart's fondest wish, which is to nap.

So you can't call me. But I have tried this year to present you with something even better: Welcome to Wine & Dine 2003, which presents to you Pick to Sip, which I designed to give you both an intimate portrait of the best wine retailers in the Twin Cities and a guide to exactly what to buy in those shops. So it will be just like I was there next to you, with all my connections and weight, but without my annoying schedule!

Here's how it worked: I asked people in the 15 best wine shops in town to select three bottles from their stock that totaled $30. Three $10 bottles, two $6 ones and an $18 bottle, whatever. I told them the bottles had to be from their regular priced stock, not sale prices. Whatever they picked had to be available in large enough quantities that y'all could buy it for the next few months. Finally, they had to tell me why they liked the wine. Then, I visited these wine-brains' stores, and bought the wine, so that I could taste it myself.

I did this for two reasons. The first being so I could taste the wines, because I'm not going to recommend anything to you that I can't talk about intelligently. And the second, because it seemed like the ethically correct thing to do, because I don't want anyone to be able to accuse me of choosing something over something because it was free, or like that.

Because of the highly unorthodox way I went about compiling Pick to Sip, you'll see it's about as opposite to something like Wine Spectator as possible. For one thing, every single wine is available in this market. And in fact, I bet a lot of these wines aren't even available anywhere else in the country. For another, usually wineries only send critics samples of wines they want them to write about, which is why wine reviews are always tilted to high-end, high-profit wines. Not so here! There are a lot of country wines in here that the winemakers have never made a PR sheet for, and don't know are being written about. This is completely unusual.

In fact, I dare say this entire publication is pretty unusual, because I tried to re-invent the wine guide from the ground up, always trying to figure out what would be most useful to you, the reader.

Some things didn't quite go as planned. For instance, when I started all this I thought I would award a "winner," to the wine person with the best taste in all the land. I bailed on that pretty quick, once it became apparent that people's tastes, and strengths, are so wildly different that it's like trying to pick whether strawberries or blackberries are indeed the "better" fruit.

I will say that at can-do Zipp's in Minneapolis they had the most adventurous and eye-opening selections; it was a very rewarding dip into a wine country made new. France 44 had the most refined and elegant selections; it was definite proof that with the right insider dope you can drink like a millionaire for 30 bucks. Both Surdyk's and Hennepin-Lake proved why they're so well liked, as they both came through with big flavors that are sure to please a solid majority, and were adventurous without being alienating. I was terrifically impressed by two stores I'd never been to, Stillwater's Sutlers and the Golden Valley Byerly's. These two places were so disarmingly all-out super-super-friendly that it renewed my faith in Minnesota nice, and showed me how it can be fused with deep wine knowledge in a way that makes shopping for dinner a giddy little party.

I will also say I was wildly, incredibly impressed with the wines you can get in this town for under $12. Ask me last spring, and I'd have told you it was impossible to get a really solid American red for under $12--but the Bishop's Peak Rock Solid Red, Powers' Cabernet Sauvignon, and, above all, Lyeth's L de Lyeth Cabernet Sauvignon proved me blissfully wrong.

As far as truly cheap wines go, if you all don't rush right out and get a bottle of the plump and plush $6.50 Bear Crossing from Angove's, please know you're missing out on the bargain of the year; unless you're really a card-carrying dry-loving bohemian, in which case the $6 Gandia will be your pick. A cheap, dry table wine? Who says things aren't going your way?

As far as white wines go, Minnesota has really revealed itself to be a land of untold adventures. Almost every shop in town has weird white varietals you've never heard of that are as amazingly great as they are amazingly cheap. The white Minervois at Zipp's is a must-try for anyone who is looking to have their world turned upside down: a dry white table wine with sauternes-like top notes? Eh? The dry strawberry evanescence of the rosé Cabernet de Saumur, made entirely from Cabernet Franc, is a joyful surprise. And the sour, lemony pucker of Argentinean Torrontes adds a whole new category to the white wine experience.

The one thing I was not impressed with in researching this piece was how goofy and meaningless everyday wine prices are: I myself tend to buy wine during my favorite shops' sales, and never thought about it too much until this project. However, I've now come to realize that nearly every wine shop has these massive wine sales every six or eight weeks, and they basically do all of their business during these "sales." So are the "sales" the regular prices? Something ain't right. At least one shop decided that sale prices are the only prices that count; see if you can spot them.

What else? You'll see quotes from the profiled wine people in the stories about the wine they recommend. These were arrived at in the following way: Some wine people wanted to type up their tasting notes, and they gave them to me to use. Others told me in a face-to-face interview what they thought, and in still others I combined things they wrote with things they said, to give you the most complete information I could on the wines you're picking.

So here it is! The Wine & Dine Pick to Sip. I hope you like it. My fondest hope for this all is that it will make you happier, more relaxed, more confident, better supplied wine shoppers. That you'll throw this supplement in the back of your car and spend the rest of the year working through it, and that through that process you'll find your favorite stores in the region, and discover things you never knew existed, and avenues to enjoying life that were heretofore obscured!

And above all I really hope you like it. It was a lot of wine, a lot of logistics, a lot of driving, a lot of research, a lot of recycling, even, culminating in this crazy-long book. But if it's what you really, really wanted, if it's what you wanted that you didn't even know you wanted, I'll nap just a little easier.