But at the same time as McInerney's career as a novelist was going sideways, a new possibility was opening up. In the mid-1990s he became wine writer for House & Garden, which had recently been taken over by a friend. When House & Garden folded in 2007, he was taken on as "wine consultant" to the Wall Street Journal. The articles collected in The Juice are predominantly taken from these publications, seasoned with a handful from Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, etc. Read individually, as they came out month by month over a period of years, they must have seemed run-of-the-mill. They were often unusually well-written by comparison with ordinary wine journalism, but aside from that verbal embellishment, they looked nothing special. A typical format would be to take a particular grower, a particular type of wine, or a particular region, and to fold into a brief narrative of a visit a sprinkling of factual information which could have been assembled by anyone able to use an index from any half-decent collection of standard wine reference works.

The provision of uncommon information was never the point of these articles. Their merit lay elsewhere, in areas that had affinities with the fictive side of McInerney's life which was just then in the process of fraying. It was as if the energy and focus which had previously gone into his novels was being decanted into a new format.

The persona McInerney crafted for these pieces was never too pungent, and was deliberately kept close to what the average reader would know about the actual McInerney.  But it was nevertheless a subtle fictive creation composed of various elements. A prominent ingredient in the mix was the pampered epicure, demanding a series of the rarest vintages to accompany lavish meals taken in Michelin-starred restaurants. Another, slightly in tension with this, was the outsider who jealously preserved his lack of professional credentials while mixing with the world's wine aristocracy. And yet a third was the child avid for gratification — the more and the sooner, the better. At times reading these pieces one is put in mind of nothing so much as Yeats's wonderful image of Keats in "Ego Dominus Tuus":

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave    
His senses and his heart unsatisfied, . . .
Shut out from all the luxury of the world