1.   As Western culture spread, so did wine, from the Mediterranean throughout Europe, and then to Australia, South Africa and the Americas.

2.   Alsatian wines are doing well, and Austrian wines are suddenly everywhere.

3.   Certain wines do more or less the same job, although not the big-shouldered chardonnays that many diners wind up drinking before a meal.

4.   For wines that emphasize ripe fruit flavors, as the nouveau wines do, early and complete ripening is a promising sign.

5.   It makes you stop and consider it, as wine does.

6.   It showed what the Beringer winemaker, Ed Sbragia, called a sparkle or brightness that the earlier wines did not.

7.   Krug wines did well, particularly the C.K. Mondavi line of jug wines.

8.   The Mezzogiorno wines did for northern Italy what the wines of Algeria and Morocco did for the wines of the cooler regions of France.

9.   There is more in that vein, but suffice it to say that, so far, this wine is doing exactly as predicted.

10.   What is important is the fact that all the wines had held up admirably and that good American wines do indeed age well.