Lunch with Jay McInerney, it has to be said, is a more than usually enticing prospect. Although the author of Bright Lights, Big City is, at 57, inevitably less wild than he used to be, he still has a reputation as a committed hedonist. At his suggestion, we meet in the Spotted Pig near his home in Manhattan's West Village. There's more than a touch of Shoreditch about it – but this isn't wholly surprising, because the chef and co-owner, April Bloomfield, is a Brit who moved from the River Café to open it in 2004. It was an instant hit, and spawned what the New Yorker called the city's "gastro-pub revolution".
When I arrive, a few minutes late, McInerney is already installed in an alcove on the largely empty first floor, sipping what I assume is a cocktail. He's dressed more casually than I expected – he is known for his love of bespoke tailoring – in jeans, Converse and a plain blue shirt. He's soon regaling me with stories about the restaurant's early days, and how this room used to be "a sort of private den of iniquity for friends of the owner. You'd come up here after dinner and you'd find Bono, Helena Christensen and Mario Batali [the famous New York chef] rolling about on the floor."
I ask McInerney what he's drinking and he surprises me by telling me that it's iced tea. What's more, he isn't going to have wine with lunch. "I'm sorry, I have a massive day," he says. "I don't really drink at lunch when I'm working. I know that sounds heretical. It flies in the face of my persona and British habits."
It's true that McInerney is just about the last person you'd expect not to drink. In addition to being a pleasure-seeker, he's also a serious wine buff who, since the mid-90s, has had a parallel career writing about wine, first for House & Garden magazine and then for the Wall Street Journal. In fact the whole reason we're having lunch today is so he can tell me about his latest book, The Juice, a collection of his columns. So it's something of a disappointment to learn that he's not drinking. I was, to be frank, looking forward to the idea of getting smashed with Jay McInerney.
Can he really not be persuaded? No, he says. After lunch, he has another interview, then a meeting about a TV show, and then a dinner tasting '78 Barolos ("1978 was an incredible year in Piedmont"). He's also just returned from France, where he hung out with another celebrated bon vivant, his old pal, the editor and writer Bill Buford, and drank one of the world's most expensive wines, La Tâche, for breakfast. In other words, he needs a breather, which seems fair: it must be exhausting being Jay McInerney, having all these appointments to keep, having so much fun.
Fun, of course, is something he's long been interested in. He had lots of it upon arriving in New York in the early 80s, when he spent his time going to gritty night clubs, snorting coke and squiring various models. These experiences formed the basis for his scabrous debut, Bright Lights, Big City, which was an immediate success when it appeared in 1984, making him both rich and famous. He was soon a member of the literary "brat pack" – its two other chief members were Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz – and continued moving in glamorously debauched circles, plundering his life in his fiction. In the late 80s and early 90s, he published a stream of novels, including what is probably his best, Brightness Falls, about the Wall Street excesses of the era.
Our starter arrives: a large slice of toast spread with a voluptuous coating of chicken liver paté. McInerney divides it in two, and we tuck in: it's immediately clear why Bloomfield's cooking is so rated. After seeking advice from my companion, I have a glass of rosé from the Minervois. He has more iced tea.
"I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices," McInerney says. "I don't do recreational drugs any more. It was fun while it lasted but it became repetitive. But I did get a lot from it as a subject matter. The point is not to be debilitated by your pleasures. Maybe I have lucky genes or something but I've never been truly addicted to anything, except pleasure in general."
These days, one suspects, McInerney's main source of pleasure is his full-blown wine habit. Though when I suggest this, he quickly corrects me: "That and sex." (He's on to wife number four, the heiress Anne Hearst.) But the pieces in The Juice, I suggest, certainly could lead one to believe that his life is one long round of wine tastings. Doesn't he worry that all this oenophilia might detract from his reputation?
"In the UK you had this longstanding wine culture that was stuffy," McInerney says. "In the US, it was different. A culture sprang forth that wasn't based on tradition. It seemed like we were discovering it for the first time." In fact, he says, he didn't publish his first collection of wine columns, Bacchus & Me, in the UK for this very reason – because he thought it might make him look square. (He needn't have worried: where other critics talk of "floral notes", he calls Domaine de la Romanée-Conti the "Ferrari of Burgundy" and Puligny-Montrachet "a Grace Kelly of a wine".)
In any case, he points out, it's not as if he has only moved on to wine in middle age, as a substitute for the more illicit pleasures of youth. He was interested in it from the start. When Bright Lights was accepted, he tells me, he was working in a wine shop. "I had a phone call from my girlfriend telling me the news, and I immediately bought a Bordeaux I'd been keeping my eye on. It probably cost $15 but I'd never spent that much on a bottle of wine before."
Our main courses have arrived: McInerney has haddock chowder, and I have fried duck egg with ramps and an anchovy dressing. As we eat, McInerney elaborates on the appeal of wine. "It's a way of intellectualising the pleasure principle. There's not much to be said about vodka. But wine exfoliates in all directions – in terms of literature, history, agronomy, meteorology." He pauses and adds: "And it's a way of getting drunk. I don't think I'd be nearly as interested if it wasn't alcoholic."
I suspect another factor is the window it gives him on to what has always been his muse: the world of excess, of rich kids behaving badly. One of the most eye-opening pieces in The Juice is about a group of phenomenally rich wine collectors who call themselves the "angry men". They're an unappealing crew – they have a habit of summing up $1,000-bottles with comments like, "Tighter than a 14-year-old virgin".
McInerney, to his credit, finds this repugnant. But he's clearly fascinated, too, and happy to benefit from their largesse. (He estimates that, on one lavish night, he personally consumed $20,000-worth of their wine.) "Those guys aren't my friends," he says. "I would rather drink good wine in great company than great wine in bad company. But I do find them interesting."
Our main courses have been cleared and we're on to coffee. McInerney is looking at his watch – he has that other interview to get to. I ask for the bill and he makes his way out into the afternoon drizzle. Two things, above all, struck me during our lunch. The first is that, even in non-drinking mode, he's very good company. The second is that he's a rare example of someone who has got away with trading on their own mythology.
In one sense, there's something slightly disconcerting about McInerney: you feel he should have grown up by now, got all that fast living out of his system. But he hasn't and, oddly, that's part of his charm. One thing seems certain: Jay McInerney is never going to stop having fun.
The Juice: Vinous Veritas is published by Bloomsbury, rrp £14.99
