Roberto Paris, the sommelier at the Bond Street Italian restaurant Il Buco, has a poetic way of looking at things. He looks at the term “wine business” as an oxymoron, and he prefers not to call his patrons anything so coarse as “customers.”

Anyone might develop such an aesthetic sensibility if exposed daily to the atmospheric cellar in the 19th-century brick building Il Buco has called home since 1994.It is this cavity that scholars believe inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write his chilling 1846 revenge tale, “The Cask of Amontillado.”The story follows the mad plotting of one Montresor as he wreaks retribution on Fortunato, at whose hands he has suffered a “thousand injuries.” Finding the fatuous Fortunato, a preening wine connoisseur, drunk one night, Montresor leads him back to his cavernous, nitre-lined cellars, deep beneath the Montresor family palazzo.

“This area used to be a red light district,” Mr. Paris,52,said.”So this was a saloon where alcohol, absinthe, and opium was served. There is a letter of exchange between Edgar Allan Poe and the lady living on the third floor.The story about Poe being somehow related to the building, and the fact that literary scholars believe that ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ was actually conceived here, led to New York University leading an expedition after the Second World War.”

An early paragraph in Poe’s story reads: “I passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to be cautious as he followed. We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together upon the damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors.”

Indeed, the staircase to Il Buco’s cellar is narrow and the brick- and field stone-lined sanctum is vaguely sepulchral, despite the cheering effect of the warm lighting and some rough-hewn tables and chairs. (The space is a popular locale for private parties.) No bones line the walls, as in the Poe tale, but three stone vaults near the back look perfectly suited for the story’s wicked crescendo, when Montresor fetters his nemesis inside a dark niche and then slowly bricks up the opening, sealing him in.

But Mr. Paris snuffs out such morbid musings. (Spoilsport!) The vaults, he said, which are now filled with wine, probably originally sheltered furnaces.

Mr. Paris is not only the sommelier of Il Buco, but also its maitre d’ and general manager. He and the restaurant’s co-founder, Alberto Avalle, both attended the same high school in Foligno, Italy. By 1995, when Mr. Paris came to New York, they had lost touch. He learned that Mr. Avalle had opened Il Buco through an article in New York magazine and sought out his old friend. After a few years, Mr. Avalle and his partner, Donna Lennard, asked him to stay on as wine consultant. His responsibilities grew from there.

At the time of Mr. Paris’s arrival, the historic cellar was doing time as a storage room. That soon changed. “It was my second day here,” he said, “and I told the owners, We are partially Umbrian and we should take this chance and make it one of our identity traits.” The result: The 450-wine list is 65% Italian, with a healthy representation of Umbrian offerings, including Mr. Paris’s pet grape, Sagrantino. Almost extinct 30 years ago, the deeply colored, tannic wine, native to Montefalco, has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. If New Yorkers are familiar with the varietal, there’s a good chance Mr. Paris is responsible.

“Some restaurants have Sagrantino on their list, but one or two,” he said.”I know for sure that outside the city limits of Montefalco, there is only one restaurant in the world with nine Sagrantinos.” That includes one Sagrantino made especially for Il Buco by Giuliano Ruggeri, a vintner who produces a minuscule 9,000 bottles a year.

Despite its rising popularity, Sagrantino is not, of course, Umbria’s most famous wine. That would be Orvieto, the best-selling white from the cathedral town of the same name. But Orvietos are hard to find on the Il Buco list.

“The thing is, we don’t know what is in the bottle,” Mr. Paris said. “Orvieto used to have a certain DOC regulation.Now they can throw in everything.They can throw in chardonnay. That’s the main problem with a lot of wine regions in Italy, maybe in the world. You don’t know what they’re going to use.”

Mr. Paris’s desire to know what’s in his bottles extends to the rest of the list. He travels often to Italy, France, Spain, and Australia. “It’s very hard to imagine what a wine is, or should be, or can be, without seeing where it’s coming from. If you really want to improve your wine knowledge, you’ve got to go to places and see why the same grape has a different result in the span of 10 miles.”

Behind Italy, Spain is the most represented country on the list. And yes, Edgar, there are three Amontillados.