Usually I feel like I have a pretty good handle on wine. Alone, I enjoy flavors and textures at a mostly internal level, conducting conversations among the different micro-selves who compose my being. With friends, the pleasures spring from externalized communication: conviviality, mutual appreciation or even the prickly delight of disagreement.

Moving from amateur drinking contexts to professional ones, such as journalistic assessments, trade tastings, meetings with suppliers or conferences with colleagues, the intentions change and so do the rewards I reap. I’ve done it long enough to feel reasonably confident I know what I’m doing.

There is one sort of situation, however, that continually reminds me how little I know, how my “pretty good handle” is, at best, elegant self-deception, and that is when I taste wine with someone who actually makes wine. A conscientious winegrower’s sensitivity to flavors and textures in wine, her dedication to soil – not grapes – as the true progenitor of wine, her humility hard-won by acquiescence to the vagaries of nature and time, her devotion to details and passion for place fill me with appreciation and awe. And acknowledgment that there is a lot I don’t know.

Ironically, these dislocating experiences, the ones that so convincingly assert my ignorance, provide great pleasure (if I can move past the initial bruises to my ego). Reminders of how vast and complicated the world is, how high the ratio of the mysterious to the settled, are the greatest gifts a devotee of any subject can receive.

You think you know about guitar solos? Spend an hour with Jimmy Page or J Mascis, then let’s talk. Newly humbled, newly comprehending what lies before you, newly aflame, keep striving. Same goes for photography or gardening or baseball or wine (or beer). Time spent with masters of a craft rearranges the landscape dramatically. There’s an urgency to these musings, because starting tonight and through the beginning of November, Portland is hosting several of the greats. Winegrowers have passed through town before, to conduct dinners with the public and explain the intricacies of their work. But has there ever before been such a concentration of virtuosos in Portland in so condensed a time period? Not that I’m aware of. From Oct. 29 until Nov. 7 – barely more than a week – Portland-area diners and oenophiles will have five separate opportunities to experience wine under the very best circumstances short of a trip to a vineyard – with growers, vignaioli (Italian for, literally, “vine dresser” but usually translated as winegrower) and other giants.

A month later, in December, yet another dinner is scheduled with a fascinating, even controversial, well-known winemaker.

Each of the individuals has gained international recognition, first for the high quality of his or her product. These are wines to savor and appreciate as drinks. But they also are the sorts of wines that stimulate intense reactions, because they strive toward a greatness that has psychological aspects. They aren’t just delicious. They are interestingly, complicatedly delicious – they stretch you. And they are best consumed accompanied by a guide.

All of the featured players are known, too, for exploring what a connection to the land looks like in the 21st century, as increasingly globalized industrialization threatens to eradicate our shared natural heritage. This is the cutting edge, and the concerns are urgent. Don’t let these turbo-boosts to your appreciation of wine, agriculture, food, ethics, aesthetics and the natural world pass you by.

Tonight, Oct. 29, the cup runneth over. Four winemakers, united by nationality but more importantly by their devotion to minimal intervention, nature-based wine production, will be at Vinland restaurant. All of the wines use organically grown grapes, which ferment on their native yeasts after hand-harvesting and receive no sulfur during vinification.

Elisabetta Foradori, at her namesake winery in Trentino, Italy, makes dramatic mountain wines at the base of the Dolomites. The ones I’ve had the chance to taste are exceptionally elegant, precise and profound. The grapes expose new worlds of flavor and mineral conveyance: Manzoni Bianco and Nosiola for whites, and the red Teroldego.

Alessandra Bera makes wines in Piemonte, primarily exquisite Moscato D’Asti (or so I’ve read; I haven’t yet tasted it) but also a white blend from the indigenous grapes of the region, as well as Dolcetto and Barbera.

Elena Panteloni helps run La Stoppa in Emilia-Romagna, producing fascinating Barbera and Bonarda wines, including the region’s justly famous frizzante (gently sparkling) reds.

Farther south, in Tuscany, Silvio Messana of Azienda Agricola Montesecondo produces some of the world’s most interesting Chianti Classico, biodynamically.

Italy remains the ticket a few days later, for back-to-back dinners with the winemaker and importer Giorgio Rivetti of La Spinetta. He will be at O’Maine Studios with Rosemont Market (where I work) on Saturday, and then Sunday night at The Corner Room. I have written about La Spinetta before in this space, because for two years now I have been captivated by Rivetti’s wines and his winemaking approach.

Interestingly, there are La Spinetta wines from both Piedmont and Tuscany. Rivetti’s experience as an importer has given him access to more different wines than many other winemakers, and he appreciates the opportunity to bring his perspective to a diversity of sites: the elegant, long-lived finesse of Piedmont in the north; the gusto and muscularity of Tuscany in the center. The wines remain utterly distinct, yet share a common spirit, with grapes grown organically and farmed biodynamically. They express a simultaneous power and suppleness that simply must be experienced to be believed.

Given my job, I get to drink a lot of wine, often for free. And there’s always something new to learn, so I move from one wine to the next, often more rapidly than I’d like. But I buy La Spinetta wines for myself, again and again – partly because I adore them, and partly because they always remain just an inch or so beyond my grasp. I am compelled to keep learning through these wines, and to have Rivetti himself here to help me will be a great opportunity indeed.

There are not many people who feel comfortable exploring the diverse, and diversely magnificent, wines of Germany, Austria and Champagne without some help. Blame a combination of national prejudices, misinformation and the inexplicable fact that Americans get freaked out by the German language. The person who has done the most in this country to reverse that ignorance and misperception, to pretty much lay his own blood on the line for these wines, to inspire us to give them their due is Terry Theise.

Theise does not make wine, but the James Beard Award–winning importer and much praised writer has a uniquely captivating way of making it feel important and worth fighting for. It’s for this reason that he has accrued an almost mythical status among wine lovers. He will lead a wine dinner at Hugo’s restaurant on Nov. 6 to communicate the soul of the exquisite wines of Germany and Austria – Riesling, Grüner Veltliner and more, including the dramatically improving reds. I can’t imagine any guest at this event will walk away untransformed.

The next night, Nov. 7, Theise will be at Mayo Street Arts in Portland’s Bayside to turn his attention to his other passion: Champagne. That’s a place, by the way, not a generic term for bubbly wine. Theise has been at the forefront of the movement to recognize wines from Champagne as wines rather than luxury lifestyle accessories. Grower Champagne, a category he helped create (though he prefers the term “farmer fizz”), is wine made by the people who grow the grapes.

Almost all Champagne is made by large companies who buy grapes and blend them to produce a “house style.” Grower Champagne is made on an exceedingly small scale, by the people who grew the grapes. The wines are almost heartbreakingly elegant and pure, and they express a stunning diversity of personalities. (The Champagne event is also being co-hosted by Rosemont Market, and I will be the evening’s emcee.)

Finally, on Dec. 6, Vinland will be the stage once again, for the philosopher king of the magic mountain, Etna on Sicily: Frank Cornelissen. Cornelissen makes demanding, mind-bending wines from Nerello Mascalese and other indigenous grapes on the volcanic soil of Mount Etna. He says his ultimate intention is to make “liquid rock,” wine out of magma. There is nothing like his wines, and nothing like him.

Joe Appel works at Rosemont Market. He can be reached at:

soulofwine.appel@gmail.com

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