Jon Rimmerman, the Garagiste Founder and Wild Raconteur of Wine

Emily Shur for The New York Times

Jon Rimmerman, the founder of Garagiste, samples a red.

Standing in the low-ceilinged basement of a rundown Seattle bungalow, among the shiny steel vats and plastic tubing that constitute Animale winery, the wine merchant Jon Rimmerman swirled his glass, sniffed its bouquet, took a sip and moved his mouth around as if chewing. A fair-skinned, dapper and somewhat elfin man, Rimmerman wore Kelly green jeans, a lavender sweater and a black-and-white plaid sportcoat. Salt-and-pepper curls bushed out from under his Greek fisherman's cap as he bent over a white plastic bucket. Spitting out a great purple jet of wine, Rimmerman signaled to the winemaker Matt Gubitosa that he could taste exactly one more vintage before leaving.

Shira Young for The New York Times

The vineyards of the Savoie, in the French Alps.

From the outside, Animale — named for Gubitosa's dead but still-beloved cat, whose image has appeared on many Animale bottles — looked more like a methamphetamine lab than a winery, with an overgrown lawn, a faded gnome statue and reflective insulation covering all the basement windows. On the inside, Animale was clean and well lighted, with all proper licensing, classic R. & B. on the radio — "a little bit louder now!" — and a sleepy kitten.

"That's the Dolcetto?" Rimmerman asked, as Gubitosa poured.

"Two thousand ten, yes. You need some pizza with that. I use cultivated yeast, but no mechanical anything."

Rimmerman is the founder and sole owner of Garagiste, the world's largest e-mail-based wine business. With 136,000 subscribers, Rimmerman says that Garagiste does, on average, $30 million in annual sales offered exclusively through his long, florid, self-mythologizing daily e-mails. "Dear Friends, somewhere along the path to wine-related enlightenment" began a recent one, which later evoked "the incredulous 1970s chemical salesman, dumping buckets of toxic pesticides" onto the vineyards of poor Chambertin, Margaux, Latour. "At some point, the land gives up. It must be resuscitated over decades to fully escape the poison (similar to smoking — the body eventually cleans itself and regenerates, but a certain scarring remains)." He then conjured lovely Sardinia, Europe's "truest untouched terra firma," source of the obscure 2011 Rigaterri Mirau — "Djarum cigarette in your glass . . . massive pine forest, clove, resin," a "once-in-a-blue-moon" steal at $18.61 a bottle.

Despite Animale's admirable smallness, Rimmerman was skeptical going in: only months earlier, Robert Parker's Wine Advocate gave Gubitosa's 2009 Petit Verdot a stellar 92-point rating; Rimmerman has built his reputation by differentiating his tastes from those of other critics, favoring the austere, eccentric and putatively authentic over what you might call the merely delicious. But now Rimmerman spit out another purple mouthful and said, with evident surprise, "That's the most unusual wine." He looked Gubitosa in the eye. "I mean, not to say whether it's good or bad, like or don't like."

Gubitosa, a burly, thin-haired 50-something who works for the United States Environmental Protection Agency when he's not cranking tunes, petting kittens and making fine wine, nodded. Point taken.

"But it has a personality."

"Yeah, it's not for everybody," Gubitosa conceded.

"The pepper, it's incredibly crushed on the nose and through the palate, with those hard tannins," Rimmerman said. "There's nothing fun about that." This was a backhanded compliment. Wines of integrity — wines of "character and terroir," to use Rimmerman's term — aim not to please but to express what Rimmerman calls, in all seriousness, "vinous truth," meaning the honest expression of a particular grape varietal, grown in a particular place, in a particular year. "People have distilled my life down to, He's in pursuit of the truth, more broadly, in all things," Rimmerman says.

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