“If I didn’t think it was possible somewhere in the world to create a wine that was truly expressive, I wouldn’t make wine,” said the British-born Brooklyn-based journalist and author Lawrence Osborne. “And I wanted to write a book about wine that was expressive, too. The only way to do that was to grapple with one’s own deficiencies. That’s what expression is.”

The result of Mr. Osborne’s grappling was 2004’s “The Accidental Connoisseur,” the wine novice’s comic and insightful intellectual stagger through the world’s vineyards and their keepers. The volume surprised its writer and publisher by going through nine printings in six months, making it one the most successful, non-guide books on vino in recent memory. A paperback version was released on March 3.

The text caught an unprecedented wave of Yankee wine consciousness that has yet to crash. Last fall, the film “Sideways” used oenophilia as its thematic background. And on March 23, Film Forum will host the American premiere of Jonathan Nossiter’s hit European documentary about the wine industry, “Mondovino.” Mr. Osborne’s timing seems to have been uncanny. Then again, maybe things aren’t as serendipitous as they appear.

“I’ve known Jonathan for about 25 years,” said Mr. Osborne, who says he is in his 40s. “Jonathan and I planned both my book and his film at about the same time. He is an expert in ways that I’m not. It was Jonathan who introduced me to wine in the first place. Both of us wanted to do things that were – I hate the world globalization – but something about how mass taste is created in a digital age.”

Indeed, his initial intention was not to write a book about wine, but a study of taste – “an idea of ourselves, that’s usually wrong,” as he put it. Thus, despite the success of “Accidental Connoisseur,” he freely asserts: “I’m not a wine writer.”

Certainly, he paid scant attention to the half carafe of white planted near our elbows at the Bedford Street wine bar ‘Ino – a Falanghina from the Campania region of Italy that we had selected because of our unfamiliarity with the grape. Waited-for natterings about floral notes and pleasing viscosity never arrived. He seemed more engaged by the overpowering Led Zeppelin tape that nearly foiled our conversation.

Nearly, but not quite. It would take more than Robert Plant’s primal howling to silence this man. Mr. Obsorne is not the sort of writer who speaks volumes in print, but in person falls dumb. His excitable sentences are many and chaotic.They cling to cogency by way of dashes and semicolons, only to inevitably plummet into ellipses. It’s an expository, caffeinated voice. It’s not a relaxing voice. But it ain’t boring either.

You might be on the jangly side, too, if you traveled as much as Mr. Osborne. Three days after our interview, he jetted off to Dubai, of the United Arab Emirates. He was invited by the Sheik Al-Maktoub to tour the developing, jellyfish-shaped Hydropolis Hotel, which will be the world’s first underwater resort, with bubble-shaped, glass-walled suites. (Tiny and ambitious Dubai is already home to the world’s tallest hotel.) After that, it’s off to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to see the Mines Resort City, a sprawling vacationland built around what used to be the world’s largest open-cast tin mine.

All of this is in service of his next tome, an exploration of global tourism tentatively titled “Where Am I?” “My real subject, I think, is the creation of norms,” he explained. “Inside ourselves, I mean, not outside. How norms are interiorized. That’s what powered the wine book and what’s powering this book as well.”

He relishes the globetrotting. Mr. Osborne, who looks the very ideal of the questing foreign correspondent – tousled black hair, flashing eyes, a romantic air of hurried, slightly louche dishevelment – is a restless sort. “I live for travel. I’m not enormously happy in New York. I like it here; I feel very at home here; I’m doing what I want. But there’s a kind of unease: ‘Let’s go to JFK and hop off.’ “A future dream project is a book on the origins of language – another age-old subject he admits he knows little about, and which would no doubt point his comfortable shoes towards the ends of the earth.

He admits, however, that research for the coming book has left him ready for a bit of a lie-down. A recent trip to Papua New Guinea was particularly taxing, though also unexpectedly rewarding. “I didn’t drink alcohol for two and a half months,” he related. “I stopped drinking wine and lost 20 pounds. It felt great. I never thought I’d say it in public, but it was a great purification.” (Say, he really isn’t a wine writer, is he!) “It’s the other side of the coin,” he continued. “We shouldn’t become these guzzling obsessives. There’s another way to live, a complementary way. We can all flip.”

Will, then, America flip? It would probably come as no surprise, after all, if the county’s current fascination with the grape is soon done in by the trend-by-trend patterns of our culture. Still, Mr. Osborne, though he himself has moved on to new interests, disagrees. “It has to do with America’s relationship with Europe,” he theorized. “There’s a profound, anguished superior-inferior complex. At that same moment, people have a more benevolent version of the same thing. A doctor in Iowa will say, ‘My wife and I go to Venice very year.’ I find those people very moving. They go there for a reason. They want to belong to something older than their world. [Wine importer] Neal Rosenthal believes this too. He thinks America becomes much more vibrant and rich when we connect with an ancient thing, which belongs here, which doesn’t have to be shut out. And wine’s one of those things.”

“As you reach your 30s and 40s,” Mr. Osborne reasoned, getting a bit more personal, “one feels a deepening need to reconnect with where one’s living now, where one sits relative to the wider culture.”

The stream of chat ceased as he caught sight of a newspaper lying on the bar. A headline communicated the death of infamous counterculture journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who had killed himself the previous day. Mr. Osborne was momentarily startled into silence.

“67,” he wondered aloud, sounding wounded. “Is that a good age to kill oneself?” He paused. “Maybe it is. It’s not that I’m a huge admirer. I’m not. But there was something sympathetic about his spirit.” In a world of increasingly interiorized norms, absolutely.