I had my first glass of wine when I was 6. It was at my Grandfather’s Passover Seder and I fell asleep. The wine was Manischewitz, made from sweet, concord grapes, and it worked for me both as a religious experience and as a soporific.

That was wine for me for many years until I was 24 and began working for New York’s famous “21” Club. This job enabled me to taste many world-class wines with the “21” sommeliers and hear their comments and edit them for the wine list. I took an immediate liking to these very upscale wines and my wine career was off and running, thanks to having the “21” Club on my resume.

Now (drum roll), after all these years in wine, I can distill all I know about wine into one tidy feature and share it with you.

Aging wine: Really good advice? Don’t do it. If you must play the “lay down wine in the cellar” game, you have to know what you’re doing. A precious few white wines improve with age and only a few great red wines do. If you do age these wines, you have to have a good cellar at a steady, cool, temperature and you have to pay attention to these wines, tasting them from time to time to see how they’re evolving. If you don’t, you’ll have a lot of wine pouring down the old sink along with tears of regret.

Wine and Food Pairings: People who spend time and money at “wine pairing” seminars given by experts are playing in a fool’s paradise. Twenty years ago, I had a beautiful roast chicken at Omero Restaurant in the Tuscan Hills overlooking Florence. The wine was Brolio Chianti. I had it with Brolio’s owner, the delightful and engaging Bettino Ricasoli, the 32nd Baron of Brolio, and our equally delightful wives. That red wine was great — a perfect match.

Last week, I had the same chicken dinner, overlooking Tomales Bay, with my wife. The wine was a California Pinot Grigio, Pietra Santa. The wine was great — chilled, crisp and delicious. The chicken, by the way, is the best chicken one can buy in the Bay Area. It’s from Costco. To sum up: There are 14,000 delicious wines that pair beautifully with roast chicken. No bones about it. Skip the wine and food pairing seminar circuit; go to your wine merchant and buy some wines.

Wine Books: Most wine books begin, “This wine book is not like any other wine book,” and then proceeds to read just like every other wine book. If a book wants to demystify wine, why does it take 400 pages to do it? Now there’s the mystery.

Wine Descriptors: This insane adjective business goes from pompous to silly. I can deal with hints of lemon, peaches and apples. However, in a recent issue of a top wine magazine there were (honest) these descriptors: hints of smoke, incense, cinnamon-scented oatmeal, quince, dill, tar, mineral, flint, ground stone and graphite. Lemon and apples, OK, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to suck pencils and kiss a rock to get what I’m supposed to taste in a wine.

Silly Wine Names: I suppose having a wine for dinner called Pink Jock is fun for about 15 seconds, but the joke stretches thin after a very brief time. If a wine needs a funny name for your support, it can’t be that great. All puns intended.

Cork Debate: I think the cork folks are trying hard to make amends for a run of bad corks, but to me the closure of the future is a variant of the twist-off cap, or the one with a small round ball as stopper. Plastic corks are so hard to get out of a bottle that one can get a hernia for his or her trouble. They’re even bottling fine sparkling wine in crown caps, like sodas. Stick around for the eventual resolution!

Point Scores: There’s a flip side to ultra-high wine scores. Most 100-point wine scores mean the wine is so rich it could knock you over, and it’s likely very pricey. Most 88-point wines are bargains and taste like wine — not wine on steroids.

How to buy wine at Trader Joes: Many of their wines are rock-bottom cheap — overstock or over the hill — and wineries want to dump them. Some are very good; some were never good to start. Here’s what the pros do. Go to TJs. Buy some really bargain wines, a bottle each. Take them home and open them all. See what the best ones are, then go back and buy the best by the case. Next time, they will have different wines. Same drill.

High wine prices in restaurants: Why are wine prices are so high? Because they are — get over it. Why are iced tea prices so high? Because a restaurant has to make a profit somewhere — it can’t be with expensive steaks. Solution, have a nice, delicious beer. Beer is good, too!

Why are top wines so high priced? Generally speaking, the absolute cost of a bottle of wine is about $20 or less — cork, barrel, grapes, bottle, etc. But if the winery costs $100 million and the owner has a fleet of sexy cars and makes 1,000 cases of the stuff with 20,000 collectors screaming for it…. There goes the budget. The real question is:

Why are so many delicious wines so inexpensive? They don’t have the reputation, they come from not popular (yet) places, there’s too much wine in the market. Don’t ask this question, just buy up the bargains.

Different glasses for each varietal: If you think you must have a different wine glass for each varietal, I have some gold bricks I can sell you at wholesale. The fabrication of  all those clear wine glasses contributes to greenhouse gases and the writing of the copy also contributes its own form of gas. I thought the nadir of silliness was the Reidel stemless wine glass, but no. Some other nutty manufacturer has come out with a glass with a u-shaped scoop cut out of the rim for your nose (your nose, not mine) and, finally, two very different glasses are advertised, one for pinot noir and one for Burgundy. Who tells these sincere but stupid copywriters that the  red wines of Burgundy are made from pinot noir?  

  Wine Snobs: You should avoid them. When confronted by one, here’s the drill. If the WS asks you about your favorite wine, or wines you collect, understand that the WS doesn’t care. All WS cares about is talking about his or her favorite wines and his or her collection. So deflect the question and get set for a 20-minute WS monologue. It will be so boring you won’t need your sleeping pill that evening.

Ed Schwartz is wine editor of the Nob Hill Gazette and whose latest wine-based novel has been rejected. E-mail fan mail to Ejsprwine@aol.com