Who’s got the most thankless job in the wine world? It may well be Richard Geoffroy, who is the head winemaker for Dom Pérignon, the world’s most recognizable premium Champagne brand. Like a Rolex watch or a Louis Vuitton handbag, Dom Pérignon, the top wine of Moet & Chandon, is iconic. See the label, pay top dollar, and you don’t need to think: You’ve bought the best.

But that’s just the problem: Dom Pérignon is different from a Rolex or that handbag with the LV logo. Not merely an inanimate status object, the bubbly in the dark, squat bottle with the gold-andblack label is an agricultural product, the summation of French winemaking skills and pains. It’s sourced from the most northerly, unforgiving wine region on earth. Unlike those other luxury brands, Dom Pérignon insists on engaging its owner. Its sensory parameters — if not its core character — change from one vintage to the next and go right on changing in the bottle, in the glass, and on the tongue.

“I have never seen two vintages of Dom Pérignon which are the same,” Mr. Geoffroy, 52, chef de cave at Moet & Chandon since 1990, said recently. He is also director of winemaking for all the wine brands owned by the luxury monster LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, ranging from New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay to Napa Valley’s Domaine Chandon. But Dom Pérignon is his very own, and sometimes it seems more like his paramour than his product.

Mr. Geoffroy was in town last week, ostensibly to introduce the 1999 vintage of Dom Pérignon ($160 at Sherry-Lehmann). But his greater purpose was to make the case that — depending on what company it’s in — this vintage is especially subject to shifting moods, ranging from effusive to buttoned-up. His point-making vehicle was a series of dishes he calls the “7 Sensualities,” each designed to provoke a different response from the wine and its imbiber. They added up less to a lunch than to an exploration. I engaged the “7 Sensualities” with several other journalists in Mr. Geoffroy’s 52nd-floor suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. He’d brought along Dom Pérignon’s resident chef, Pascal Tingaud, to prepare the dishes.

The first “sensuality” required each guest to hold out an upturned fist, into the hollow of which a server mounded a dollop of caviar. No utensil was permitted other than one’s tongue in slurping down the glistening delicacy. This was the mode of Caspian Sea caviar buyers who sampled the product dockside, freshly cut from the sturgeon’s belly, according to Mr. Geoffroy. “You will say, Caviar and Champagne is such a cliché,” he said. “But caviar has the ability to deconstruct wines. It breaks even the ones that are biggest and most foursquare.”

Indeed, the Champagne — full, fresh, and brimming with elusive vibrations — seemed to deconstruct the fortress of salinity, oiliness, and fishiness of the caviar. I trickled a bit of the frothy wine on my fist, and it instantly erased the caviar residue which a moment earlier had resisted a rubdown with a damp napkin. The next course, caviar atop avocado cream, mellowed the wine’s ample energy as the plain caviar had not: It was Dom Pérignon in laid-back mode, more vegetal than fruity or mineral.

The remaining five sensualities, according to Mr. Geoffroy’s conceit, traveled from the sea floor up to the surface where crustaceans swim, as expressed by a langoustine floating in a Thai soup fat with coconut milk. It wasn’t a traditional match for Champagne, but the Dom Pérignon was never more brightly fruity or accessible than with that soup. It made the wine “move through the mouth as easily as warm sand runs through the hand,” Mr. Geoffroy said. Moving on to the farm, we feasted on culatello, an Italian ham sliced translucently thin, and squab in an Oaxacan mole sauce, which elicited wisps of smoke and cinnamon from the wine. The only course that de-sensualized this Dom Pérignon was a tropical sorbet made piquant by a dash of Espelette pepper. The sorbet’s high acidity seemed to stun the Champagne into morose silence.

During the two-hour meal, the lone wine on display should have bared its secrets. But Dom Pérignon 1999 had, for me at least, remained elusive, even evasive. I never caught hold of its essence. Later, I confessed my failure to Mr. Geoffroy. He waved an imperious hand, as if to say, what did you expect?

“The great movie stars, like Greta Garbo, are ambivalent,” he said. “That’s how Dom Pérignon is. You think it’s giving it’s all, but it’s not. You keep grabbing at aspects of it, but never the whole.”

So is Dom Pérignon, or at least this 1999 vintage, never to be nailed down? Mr. Geoffroy leaned forward, his blue eyes intense. “If you give enough of yourself to the wine, then it will give back.”

And so the winemaker addressed his core mission: decoupling Dom Pérignon from those other iconic brands that are objects. “Yes, Dom Pérignon is all about über-luxury,” he said. “But people take its true nature for granted. It’s not about ‘owning’ something. It’s about connecting with it. The handbag you carry is a brand. Dom Pérignon is a wine.”

It’s both, of course, and Mr. Geoffroy is a great duel promoter. But his point is well taken. Here’s another reason why Dom Pérignon is not just another luxury brand: Last week, at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, a case of Dom Pérignon rosé 1978 sold for $28,440, a huge multiple over its cost at release of under $400 a case. Can you say the same for your 29-year-old handbag?

When I asked him why this particular wine costs so much, he said, “You can’t try to justify the price. This is your chance to engage in a unique emotion. If you give to Dom Pérignon, it will give back.” And while a Vuitton handbag has a reputation for being long-lasting, Dom Pérignon may well live longer. The 1962 vintage, which I tasted last year, is still in its prime of life.