Journalism is supposed to quickly evanesce — but even after four years, I have a sharp memory of the first column by Lettie Teague that I read. It was a report of her wine-tasting trip to Burgundy with Daniel Johnnes, a wine expert well versed on the region. His French was perfect, while hers was woeful. I wasn’t prepared to be caught up in Ms. Teague’s potentially gee-whiz account of her Burgundian wanderings under Mr. Johnnes’s wing, but her dead-on observations and Taser-like wit — rare in a genre rife with pontification — did not spare her guide, the winemakers, or herself, and I was won over. She even managed an O. Henry-esque ending, disclosing why Mr. Johnnes had been a no-show years earlier at her wedding at Montrachet, the restaurant where he was then the wine director. If Nora Ephron were a wine journalist, her work would read like that of Lettie Teague, an executive wine editor as well as a monthly columnist at Food & Wine magazine (where I first wrote on wine, and still do).

In “Educating Peter: How I Taught a Famous Movie Critic the Difference Between Cabernet and Merlot or How Anybody Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert” (Scribner, 256 pages, $25), it’s Ms. Teague’s turn to be the tutor and guide. Her student is Rolling Stone magazine’s longtime movie critic, Peter Travers, whose wine knowledge, as his education begins, is as shallow as his movie knowledge is deep. The only wine he cares for is “fatty chardonnay,” and he claims a blanket hatred of Bordeaux. At his first lesson, Mr. Travers fails even to correctly hold a wine glass, let alone swirl up the aromas of the liquid within, leading Ms. Teague to wonder: “Where had he cultivated such a death grip on a wine stem?”

What might have been one long lecture to a vinously ignorant pupil is instead a lively dialogue, thanks to Mr. Travers’ ability to connect his learning to what his instructor calls the “cinematic correlative.” Learning, for example, that wines like Beaujolais nouveau and muscadet must be drunk young, he compares them to “summer-release movies.” “Nobody will want to see ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin’ six years after its release in August,” he says.

Dismissive of sherry, he delivers the ultimate put-down: “I can’t even think of a movie where people drink sherry except ‘Arsenic and Old Lace.’ ” Mr. Travers can be just as quick with praise. Upon learning about small grower champagne as an alternative to big name labels like Moet & Chandon, he exults, “Indie champagnes! They ‘re like the Sundance of champagne.”

Ms. Teague’s teaching plan covers lots of ground. In addition to with tasting sessions, she escorts her pupil to wine shops, restaurants, a wine auction, and even to a forlorn patch of pinot noir grapes growing in Westchester County that, sadly, turned out to be “a study in viticultural neglect.” The pair travel to Napa Valley so that Mr. Travers can have a close encounter with a grape he scorns: cabernet sauvignon. Amid a rolling countryside that reminds him of “Brigadoon,” he’s converted by such vaunted examples as Harlan, Hourglass, and Dalla Valle.

Even Ms. Teague, as much an expert in Napa as she was once a neophyte in Burgundy, fails to get a meeting with Jean Phillips, the elusive owner of the ultimate “cult cab,” Screaming Eagle, which she has since sold. More attuned to novels than to movies, she muses that “in some ways, Phillips reminded me of Harper Lee, the woman who wrote one remarkable book, “To Kill a Mockingbird,’ and disappeared.” Ms. Phillips does leave a lovely note and a bottle (worth several thousand dollars) of Screaming Eagle for teacher and student at their hotel, and its drinking is recounted in a later chapter.

If Mr. Travers read the galleys of this book, as he probably did, he’s a good sport. Not every subject would allow himself to be repeatedly pricked by Ms. Teague’s needles. He comes off as oafish, for example, at a session with an Argentine winemaker, Susana Balbo, nattering on about Viggo Mortensen, the “Lord of the Rings” hero, until Ms. Teague testily “wondered when we could get back to discussing wine.” In Napa Valley, Mr. Travers notices that all the male winemakers wear vests and decides that he must have one, leading Ms. Teague to observe, “Peter was tasting some of the best Napa Cabernets from the region’s top makers, and all he could do was think about was the clothes they wore?”

Mr. Travers is at his best whenever he can draw parallels between wine and movies. Newly critical of the excessively oaky wines he once favored, for example, he compares them to the 2005 movie “The Family Stone”: “The mother is dying and yet that isn’t even enough, they have to add in a hundred other sentimental things. It’s excessive. I guess you could say it’s oaky. And I don’t like an oaky movie. It just says one thing over and over again.”

In her own take on oak, Ms. Teague, like any effective teacher, drills the lesson home: “Oak is to winemakers what love is to poets, a universal and evergreen topic. But, like any subject discussed to an extreme, it can soon become tedious.” It’s to the joint credit of teacher and student that “Educating Peter,” for all its lessons, never comes close to tedium.