Barely over my ecstasy from that first amaranth-hued glass, I decided to sample another grape-smeared offering from Marin Wines, their Mount Tamalpais Merlot. My god. My GOD!

Now, yes, Merlot has been battered about by the Hollywood likes of Sideways and bad examples of the glass. And, because it had been at least five years since I traded in my last glass of Merlot for Zinfandels, Francs, Barbarescos, and anything found in the Rhone, I also laughed knowingly along with the rest of the Northern California audience as Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles, slagged off on the once-popular wine.

It wasn’t even that I agreed with what his character, Miles, said about Merlot, it’s that I had long left what I considered a cloyingly sweet and flat red for rougher cut pastures and vines. Certain Merlots were shuddering reminders of my White Zinfandel-tinted youth, and I knew that my palette had grown up and was guiding me to richer and more complex climes.

However, last year I went to a traveling seminar sponsored by Swanson Vineyards called “Merlot Fights Back.” Not only did I get reintroduced to Merlot and reminded just how good that beleaguered grape can be, but I learned that the special bottle of ‘61 Cheval Blanc Miles had been saving was a 50/50 blend of Cabernet Franc and Merlot. That’s right, fifty percent “fucking Merlot.” However, I still wasn’t buying it by the bottle or even ordering it in restaurants. Until now.

Mount Tamalpais Merlot is remarkably robust and much more like the Bordeaux of old than the fruity, jammy, Smucker’s Merlots I had given up. Rich and musty with shifting prisms of loamy complexity, this Merlot massaged my soul with long, intense strokes. After one sip, I felt myself sinking bodily into my garnet glass.

As with any new and exciting bottle, this wine deserved a special dinner, so I paired it with a flagelot bean gratin, rare rosemary-flecked sirloin lamb chops, and a peppery watercress, fennel, and French Breakfast radish salad. Limbs entangled endlessly, the creamy beans, the gamey lamb, and the crunch-spice salad wallowed happily with the velvet-tongued wine.

You can buy Mount Tamalpais Merlot at PlumpJack Wines and the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant in San Francisco, at Tomales Bay Foods in Point Reyes, and from the Marin Wine website.

Mount Tamalpais Merlot, 2004, $25.00

This past Memorial Day took me out of the cold, foggy city and up to sun-drenched Pt. Reyes Station to celebrate Cowgirl Creamery’s 10th Anniversary. Cowgirls, Cowboys, and friends and families of both gathered under circus-peaked tents to listen to the inspirational words of The Cowgirls (Peg Smith and Sue Conley), Albert Straus of Straus Family Creamery, and Janet Brown of AllStar Organics. After the speeches, the entire staff plus the Straus family and some honored customers, stood for a very long time for a very large photo and then finally went into the closed-on-Mondays Tomales Bay Foods barn to chow down on the homemade potluck.

I balanced a satisfyingly heavy plate of Laura’s Kitchen Sink Mac and Cheese, chorizo, cornbread, salad, and my own basil-mint pesto edamame in one hand and grabbed at a wine glass with the other. I had taken a long sip of the Mount Tamalpais Vin Gris 2006 and was just starting to think that it was the best pink wine I had tasted in about ten years when I heard someone behind me ask, “How’s the wine?” I turned around to see a tall guy wearing a yellow Pey-Marin tee-shirt that matched the label on another bottle sitting on the bar. I babbled about how fabulously spicy and dry the rosé was. How I hadn’t had a wine like that since I tasted my very first Rosé d’Anjou. How THIS was the kind of stiff rosé I could snuggle up with any day of the week. Then I caught myself and, gesturing at his shirt, I added politely, “Of course, I haven’t tried your wine yet.” Well, I had, because Pey-Marin and Mount Tamalpais are labels from the same wine-making family, Susan and Jonathan Pey of Marin Wines. Jonathan smiled at me and said, “I just wanted an honest reaction.”

Well, he got it. This vin gris is insanely good. It went with everything on my plate — the rich mac and cheese, the stingingly spicy chorizo, the fresh basil-mint pesto, everything. I had to have a bottle of this. Jonathan told me I could find it at Plumpjack and the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant in the city.

The bottle secured a week later, I set about trying to confuse the wine with a whole host of foods. Secretly, I knew it could stand up to every single one of them, but I still had to try. We sat down to a dinner of minted Iacopi English peas with red onion, garlic, and roasted Dirty Girl turnips, homemade black pepper fettuccine with a wild mushroom-thyme cream sauce, and a beet salad with spicy greens (Heirloom Organics tatsoi and arugula and Four Sisters flowering watercress). The vin gris not only stood up to everything, including the rich and earthy mushroom sauce, but it actually gave each dish a shove back, asserting its own strong personality without shouting them down. My amaranth-hued glass gleamed back at me across my plate as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got? Because I can take it. Bring it on, my friend. Bring. It. On.”

Even the color is fierce! None of this blush and bashful pink that’s barely a whisper of color, this was wildhotcrazy lascivious pink. The pink of deep-bosomed sunsets, the pink of Barbie’s dress from the 80s (you know the one I mean), the pink of Belle Watling’s sheets, the discontinued pink of a Clinique lipstick I wore in high school. This Mount Tamalpais Vin Gris isn’t “pink,” it’s “PINK!”

I don’t know much about wines. I just know what I like, and I loved this.

Mount Tamalpais Vin Gris 2006, $18.00

Next Week: Mount Tamalpais Merlot