I was invited to my neighbor's home in Galisteo for dinner last night to celebrate mutual friends' return from their summer abroad — so I asked if I could bring some wine.

Yes, was the answer, so I asked what was on the grill. Roasted pork, Tuscan style, my host informed me.

I spent that beautiful fall Sunday with my daughters, laying in a cord of piñon wood under the portal, hanging ristras and placing pumpkins aside the door. We played football and baseball and watched a little of both on the telly. Toward sunset, I eagerly rummaged around in the basement and pulled up a couple of older bottles of Montecalvi — my brother's wine from his home in Tuscany — and we headed across the village for supper.

I arrived to find my host turning a roast of pork on his custom-made spit, the fire made from dried branches of his old apple trees. As I feel is obligatory, we started with Champagne, Moet & Chandon Imperial Rosé, one of my favorites as of late.

I love Champagne this time of year — in fact, love it anytime of year. It's a shame that Americans don't drink more of it, making the mistake of saving it only for special occasions and the holidays. I follow Madame Bollinger's basic laws of Champagne, and I quote: "I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and I drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I'm thirsty."

Radish sandwiches — a Galisteo favorite — were served alongside some cherry tomatoes from the farmers' market stuffed with feta cheese and olives. A squash soup was served at the table and I butlered the first wine — Domaine Michele & Patrice Rion Nuits St. George 1er Les Terres Blanche 2005. Farmed biodynamically, the wine — 80 percent chardonnay and 20 percent pinot blanc — had a lovely pale yellow color and a fine nose of high-toned apricots and apples. Impeccably balanced with ripe fruit and bright acidity, it was a perfect foil for the velvety autumn soup, which was garnished perfectly with fresh thyme.

The roast pork was served with a hearty three-cheese macaroni gratin — and we were onto the red wines. I poured the first of my brother's Montecalvi wines around the table, his Estate 1998. At first swirl and sniff, I was transported home — not my home, but to my brother's and his wife's home, a home I recognize from an every-other Easter trip to Italy.

The wine's funky and familiar aroma triggered many memories. It smelled of the town of Greve in Chianti, Italy, of just-pruned dormant vines burning in the vineyard, of wild strawberries and of damp winter soil drying in the spring sun — and suddenly I was sitting with my brother under the arch of his home, talking and drinking and waiting for the leg of lamb to come out of the wood-burning oven for our Easter fête.

An untouched flavor

Such is the power of a wine with a sense of place or vintage. The French call these vins de terroir, as opposed to vins d'effort — wines that are marked by the imprint of man's effort rather than by the wine's place of origin.

A lot of wine producers today make the claim that their wines are "made in the vineyard," that they are vins de terroir, but truth be told, a lot of wines are made in the cellar. They are vins d'effort, wines that are manipulated with micro-oxygenation and spinning cones, picked ripe and watered back, acidified and cajoled and smothered into shape with other techniques to ensure that the wine has the winning combination of concentration, new wood and smooth tannins. I drink many of these wines, particularly at cocktail hour, and enjoy them very much but they do not transport me to a place.

There may be no such thing as noninterventionist wine making, since the very nature of planting vines and pruning them in bonsai fashion is intervention unto itself, but, in general, the less the intervention in the cellar, the more the potential for the wine to show its place of origin.

The next red wine at the table was my brother's 2001 Montecalvi. This wine had a more dominate nose of ripe fruit and new oak, but rooting deep in the glass I still found a telltale hint of my brother's vineyard — which, like most vineyards in Chianti Classico, is planted to approximately 80 percent sangiovese.

The 1998 vintage in Tuscany was not perfect, unlike 2001, which was a more classic vintage. Other guests noted the oak and the concentrated ripeness in the 2001. And that 2001 vintage told the story of a wine at the crossroads.

In 2002 — a problematic, rain-soaked vintage — my brother declassified the wine. Rather than making the Montecalvi Estate wine, he made a less expensive Chianti Classico, which, given the vintage, was lightly colored, not complex, easy to drink and to like. They now make two wines every year, a sangiovese from the older vines on the upper terrace that they call Montecalvi VV and a Chianti Classico from the younger vines on the lower parts of the vineyard.