By Peter Mayle

Alfred A. Knopf. 240 pp. $24.95.

Danny is making sure his scalp is "as smooth as a billiard ball" - he's rejected an alternative solution to hair loss because his trophy wife had remarked, "Underneath every ponytail is a horse's ass."

In a sly send-up of a pod of American society where "inconspicuous consumption is for wimps," Mayle describes Danny's tanned, leggy executive secretary, Cecelia Volpé, who of course can't type, much less spell (she has an assistant for that), and his many residences, cars and technological devices; and dwells lovingly on Danny's multimillion-dollar wine collection, which cannot be properly appreciated by him or anyone else because hardly anyone knows he possesses it.

Danny arranges for the publication of an article in the Los Angeles Times about the wines he has acquired, with photos and an interview that touts his prowess in the palate department. The prices are "sprinkled in the text like truffles in fois gras." The article leads to peer recognition, choice seating in various restaurants - and the theft of the great French wines from his temperature-controlled California cellar while he and his wife are away in Aspen cavorting with A-list names. I can safely reveal that the butler, although he helped, did not do it.

Enter Sam Levitt, who as "a young man with the objective of making nonviolent crime a career . . . chose the world of corporate law" and subsequently engaged in many years of undefined shady activities. That and the fact that his interest in wine led him to take a six-month course in the subject in France, with a cosmopolitan group of people from all over the world, including the "inevitable Scot" - make him the perfect person to solve the mystery.

He is called upon by the insurance agency's leggy Elena Morales to find the wine, since the company does not want to pay out either the $2.3 million the wine was insured for or the $3 million Danny claims it's worth. Sam enlists the help of various friends, including a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department who loves good French wine and describes his own uniform of black suit and tie as "undertaker chic."

Then we're off - to France, of course - in a search for clues that begins in Paris, proceeds on a tour of the great wine chateaux of Bordeaux, and leads to Marseille. Sam teams up with the lovely, efficient, leggy Sophie and her cousin Philippe, the inevitable journalist.

It would be inelegant to reveal the details of the plot, since this is, after all, a mystery. But of course there are Mayle's keen, humorous insights on Gallic life, especially the eccentricities of the people: "Sam had often noticed that the French, who like nothing better than to talk, have a brusque, almost brutal way of ending their phone conversations. No lingering farewells for them; odd, for such a loquacious race." There are detailed descriptions of menus and restaurants, both appropriately grand and lovingly local.

The characters in this novel, although fun, are not as richly complex and sharply drawn as the people we meet in Mayle's memoirs, where each chapter is a story in itself, a pearl added to the string and gracefully clasped at the end. While there are some moments of anxiety in The Vintage Caper - and I am very much in favor of nonviolent crime - I wouldn't have minded a few hints of serious danger à la Hitchcock before the mystery is solved and Sam flies off into the sunset with one of the leggy ladies.

Nonetheless, this novel provides a delightful behind-the-scenes tour of France and its wines, a satisfyingly satirical view of materialistic excesses in America, a mystery that keeps the reader guessing, and a pleasing, robust finish.