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My $1,000 lunch began, auspiciously enough, with a glass of 1983 Le Pin.

Readers of limited income unfamiliar with the tiny Bordeaux property, which each year vies with Château Petrus and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti for the dubious title of most expensive wine in the world, may be appalled to learn I swallowed, by my cursory calculation, roughly $535 worth of the prized merlot in about five sips.

(The arithmetic is based on a going average of $2,800 (U.S.) per 750-millilitre bottle, plus an auction premium for the exceedingly rare three-litre "double magnum" from which the wine was poured.)

Yes, it was really good.

No, I did not expectorate like the professional I'm supposed to be while on duty.

Then came the food, prepared by New York superstar chef Daniel Boulud and Toronto's Martin Kouprie, the latter of Pangaea restaurant in Yorkville.

Foie gras and caviar made their predictable appearances, but the standouts for me were Mr. Kouprie's oxtail ravioli with Croatian white truffles and salsify foam and Mr. Boulud's New Brunswick lobster civet and parsnip purée.

Am I starting to sound annoyingly pretentious?

The luncheon was held at the swank Toronto home of Robbie and Laura Pryde last Friday.

The chic chow-down for 32 was a centrepiece event of the 4th annual Grand Cru Culinary Wine Festival in support of research at Toronto General and Western hospitals.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say I did not actually fork out $1,000 for admission.

I had come to the Prydes' for a kitchen kibitz with Mr. Boulud - who is soon to reopen Lumière and unveil a new branch of DB Bistro Moderne in Vancouver - on a subject he knows as well as any chef in the world: cooking with wine.

Nor, strictly speaking, did the lunch masterminded by Grand Cru chairman Todd Halpern cost anyone a grand. The figure is my back-of-napkin estimate of the meal's value if it were served at Mr. Boulud's flagship Manhattan establishment, Daniel, with a modest markup applied to that glass of Le Pin.

Instead, subsidizing the meal were about 20 wealthy connoisseurs who had paid a jaw-dropping $12,500 a head to sample a succession of 26 Le Pin vintages dating back to 1979. That's when the upstart estate came out of nowhere to help ignite the garagiste movement, named for a band of elite, tiny producers operating out of utilitarian buildings generally not much bigger than a suburban garage.

The main farmhouse on the Le Pin property would blend in seamlessly next to a trailer park; all that's missing is a clothesline on the dandelion-strewn front yard.

Mr. Boulud, a native of Lyon, France, has become one of the most sought-after chefs for such hyperbolic wine events, and with good reason. Revered among wine cognoscenti such as U.S. critic Robert Parker, his dishes all are crafted specifically to be enhanced by wine. And, making him especially popular nowadays, the recommended wine in the case of his main courses is almost always red.

"When it comes to the main course, more people drink red wine than white, so all my appetizers are in a way geared to having white wine, and all my main courses are more geared to red wine," said Mr. Boulud, dressed in jeans and white chef's jacket.

One way he accomplishes that harmony is by cooking wine directly into the dish, creating a flavour bridge. Most acclaimed of all, perhaps, is his technique of marrying fish with red wine, achieved most famously with his signature "paupiette of sea bass in Barolo sauce," something he conjured up in the 1980s while making his mark behind the stove of Manhattan celebrity hot spot Le Cirque.

The dish, which I once ordered at Le Cirque and pathetically tried to replicate later with the help of a friend in my home kitchen, goes where few successful recipes have gone before, marrying a delicate white fish with a powerful, tannic Italian red. Far more complex than it appears on the surface, the recipe involves wrapping the fillet with fragile, paper-thin potato slices and carefully searing it before setting it gently atop a puddle of reduced, intricately flavoured wine.

"You need the big potatoes, otherwise it's a disaster," Mr. Boulud instructed after I had recounted my own misadventure with the dish involving remedial hemming with toothpicks, then adding, to my dejection, "and you need the experience."

I was saddened to hear from Mr. Boulud that he had recently retired the paupiette when Daniel underwent a renovation.

"I did it for 23 years and, as I redid the decor at Daniel, my chefs were pushing me and saying, 'You know, maybe you should put it into the closet, this one,' " he said laughing. But the concept is routinely reincarnated and tweaked, or, as he puts it, "once in a while we open the closet."

To my glee, he reworked it for the lunch on Friday in the lobster civet course. A lump of perfectly cooked crustacean was positioned over parsnip purée and adorned with drizzles of a complex red-wine sauce. Mr. Boulud chose to pair it with a Chianti (the Le Pin having disappeared long before), a plucky move that underscored his mastery. The sauce actually improved the red wine, to my mind, amplifying the subdued fruit in the sangiovese grape.

It left me vowing to try my hand again at a red-wine sauce for fish, but not before prevailing on Mr. Boulud for a doofus-friendly recipe that doesn't involve boiling lobster parts or sea bass bones for an eternity.

"Take one bottle of wine, a full-bodied wine," he instructed. "Add maybe one cup of [diced] shallots; the shallots will bring flavour and sweetness. Add two stems of fresh thyme. Add about six peppercorns, crushed. And, just with that simple preparation, reduce it down from one bottle to about 1/4 of a cup."

Once reduced in a saucepan, but still warm, add two tablespoons of cold butter to help thicken and hold the sauce into an almost glaze-like consistency.

That's the basic recipe. But Mr. Boulud has his chef's "tricks."

One is to reduce the wine on extremely low heat, so as to preserve the wine's fruit. "Don't boil it," he says. "Even if it takes two hours to reduce the bottle, it's okay."

Another is designed especially for wines that taste bitter due to heavy tannins, such as young cabernet sauvignon. Before reducing the wine, add five tablespoons or a quarter cup of red port.

A third and completely optional trick is to add about a quarter cup of chicken jus (the reduced stock of roast chicken bones), should you have some sitting around in the fridge like a self-respecting cook would. Add this before reducing.

Just as important as the preparation is the presentation. Treat the sauce like a condiment rather than a sloppy gravy. Pool a tablespoon or two directly onto the plate beside the cooked piece of fish. "To me, once the plate is covered with sauce, then everything tastes the same," Mr. Boulud said.

The sauce should work with just about any piece of gently baked or sautéed fish, even a tuna seared with a peppercorn crust.

It will also work with a variety of wines. Though Mr. Boulud stresses cooking only with wines that are good enough to drink, vin ordinaire such as a basic Côtes du Rhône or red from France's southern Languedoc region (two of his favourite cooking wines) will work just fine.

"Sometimes I make sauce where you need almost half a bottle per person to be reduced down to a tablespoon," he said.

In other words, save the Le Pin for drinking.