It was a straightforward and not at all naive question. “How do I know when I’m drinking a great wine?” a friend recently asked. I started to reply with the usual blather about layers of flavor, originality of taste, dimensionality, and so forth. Then I stopped myself.

“It’s really very easy,” I replied. “Great wine makes you feel like a genius.”

In all these years of thinking about wine, tasting my unfair share of great wines as well as an equally unfair share of junk, I had never realized just how little work a great wine requires of us. Usually, we’re told it’s the opposite. That understanding a great wine requires a sense of context; how you really have to know something about wine, etc.

But when you think about your “virginal epiphany,” the first time the scales fell away from your palate and you saw the wine light, I’ll bet you anything that you barely knew which end of the bottle had the cork.

Far from great wine requiring a reservoir of knowledge, it instead reaches out from the glass, grabs you by both nostrils, and, like some fantastic monster from the deep, pulls you down into its existence and holds you there. Far from suffocating, you’re exhilarated. Your senses open; your mind swells. Life seems richer, finer, fuller. You feel like you’re in on a great secret. Above all, you feel like you did it.

This is the giveaway to great wine: It does all the work, yet you feel like you’re the genius. Everything is laid out so clearly, so comprehend ably, it’s so unmistakably obvious that you grin shamelessly. “But of course,” you say, without a shred of modesty.

This is how I felt when, for example, I first tasted La Tache, one of Burgundy’s ineffably great red wines. I was a wine pup at the time. I was drinking – I swear this is true – Asti Spumante with pepperoni pizza. I thought it was a swell combination. Somehow, I found myself in front of a glass of La Tache. The rest you know. Every wine lover has such a story.

From there I, like you, tried to explore every wine highway and byway: German Rieslings, red Bordeaux, white Burgundy, Barolo, California Cabernets, and so forth. As I acquired a build-up of vintages, a kind of coral reef of wine experience, I could mentally compare the latest wine in hand with its predecessors. I felt smart. I felt experienced.

Every time I tasted a truly great wine, I thought it was me. That I was the smart one. I was a fool. Great wine has what the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, observed more than 2,500 years ago in the “Tao Te Ching”: “When the best leader is gone, his people will say, ‘Amazing, we did it all by ourselves!'”

So why don’t we drink great wines all the time? We can’t. It’s not just the money. Or the rarity. I actually know people who do drink great wines almost exclusively. They’re bored and jaded. They’re barely aware of what they’re experiencing.

The first time I saw this I was shocked. Great wine, by definition, should be a rare experience. Ironically, it’s rarer today than ever before. How can this be? It’s simple: the quality gap is closing. It wasn’t so long ago that your average wine was just that. Great wines stood out like beacons. Think of the huge gap in manners, speech, clothing, and education between peasants and gentlemen. Wine once had the same enormous, obvious distinctions.

When you read the works of once famous early-20th-century British writers such as P. Morton Shand, Maurice Healy, Andre Simon, or H. Warner Allen, all they ever seemed to taste and talk about was Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Montrachet, various Champagnes, a few “hocks” (German Rieslings), Port and the like. Their universe was populated by maybe five dozen wines.

The gap between their habitual great wines and the next level was such that they probably saw it as slumming, like having lunch with the fishmonger. As a character in Disraeli’s “Sybil” nicely put it, “I rather like bad wine. One gets so bored with good wine.”

Still, there’s no disputing the elevating, almost religious experience of drinking a great wine. Where do you look first? Everyone agrees on the answer: Burgundy.

The leading producer of “genius wines” in Burgundy is Domaine Leroy. Created in 1988 by Lalou Bize-Leroy (a co-owner and former co-director of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti), Domaine Leroy is today the hands-down winner as Burgundy’s greatest producer. Not only that, Domaine Leroy is the champ for both red (pinot noir) and white (chardonnay), which ambidextrousness is rare in Burgundy.

Of course, it comes at a price, typically between $100 and $500 a bottle. And supplies are tiny, as Domaine Leroy usually makes only a few hundred cases, if that, of any one vineyard. That said, you can get them. Retailers such as Zachy’s, New York Wine Warehouse, and Sherry-Lehmann, among others, regularly offer Domaine Leroy. (Look also onwww.wine-searcher.com.)

Lalou Bize-Leroy also owns a shipping company, Maison Leroy. Although quality for Maison Leroy wines is very fine – and prices comparably high – the “genius wines” come from Domaine Leroy, which are made only from grapes grown by the estate.

What’s Domaine Leroy got that others lack? Rigor. Its yields are easily the lowest in Burgundy. Where others talk of a low yield as 40 hectoliters of wine per hectare (2.47 acres), Domaine Leroy habitually has half that, typically 20 to 25 hectoliters per hectare.

Can you taste the difference? You sure can. These are stunningly concentrated Burgundies, with a texture unlike any others. Madame Bize-Leroy is a believer in biodynamic agriculture, a kind of ultra-orthodox form of organic cultivation and winemaking.

Almost every Domaine Leroy wine, from every recent vintage, is worth buying. I can’t think of another Burgundy estate of which I could make such a statement. Wines from 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 are uniformly superb, the best of class for their respective years.

HERE’S THE DEAL

Vintages aside, are there especially choice picks of Domaine Leroy? There are. Some of Domaine Leroy’s wines are – dare I say it? – bargains for their genius quality such as:

AUXEY-DURESSES AND AUXEY-DURESSES “LES BOUTONNIERS” DOMAINE D’AUVENAY

Domaine d’Auvenay is Lalou Bize-Leroy’s own personal label, technically separate from Domaine Leroy. These two white Burgundies from the village of Auxey-Duresses are stunning in their depth and intensity. Because Auxey-Duresses is not as prestigious as neighboring Meursault, prices for these two wines are among Leroy’s lowest, so they’re real deals. Each is $65. (Note to Burgundy geeks: the wine labeled simply as Auxey-Duresses actually is from a single vineyard, La Macabree. It’s adjacent to Les Boutonniers, which is regarded as Auxey’s best white wine vineyard.)

CHAMBOLLE-MUSIGNY “LES FREMIERES” DOMAINE LEROY

An extraordinary red Burgundy with an impossible-to-believe fragrance of crushed raspberries mingled with the perfume of pulverized stones. Although this single-vineyard wine is technically only a village-level bottling, it’s better than most grands crus. It’s heavenly stuff. $130.

VOSNE-ROMANEE “LES BEAUX MONTS” DOMAINE LEROY

One of Domaine Leroy’s blockbusters. The village of Vosne-Romanee is one of Burgundy’s most famous, capable of delivering profound red wines suffused with almost opiatic spices. Unfortunately, too few bottlings deliver the goods. This single-vineyard wine is surefire in its genius, with scents of chocolate, spices, and dark fruits such as black currant and black raspberry. It is impressively dense, strong wine. Believe it or not, it’s a deal at $285 a bottle.