Ironically, it took the arrival of Prohibition in 1919 to persuade some Americans that, if wine was banned, there had to be something good about it.

Every loophole was exploited. Homeowners learned they could still legally make up to 200 gallons of "non-intoxicating grape juice" for their own use. Quickly, packages of pressed grapes called "wine bricks" were on sale nationwide, with a stern, printed warning not to get the grapes near yeast or it might create wine. Still, when Prohibition ended in 1933, America's wine industry was in shambles. Even after World War II, the few Americans who indulged drank mostly sweet, fortified dessert wines like sherry and port.

Inferior Wines

Many California winemakers did their own reputations no favor in the '50s and '60s, putting out pallid wines from inferior table grapes, giving them imitative and misleading European names like "Burgundy," "Chablis" or Chianti."

With some very notable exceptions, it wasn't until the late 1960s that a few pioneering California winemakers -- Robert Mondavi, Joe Heitz, Sam Sebastiani -- began seriously popularizing top European grape varieties and making wines with scientific quality controls. They proudly put the grapes' real varieties on their labels -- chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot.

The revolution exploded in 1976 with the "tasting heard round the world" - a blind sampling in Paris, with French judges, in which California's 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon placed first -- ahead of France's Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Chateau Haut-Brion and Chateau Montrose.

The French were stunned. And California wineries grew from 240 in 1970 to 900 in 1990.

American wine took another leap in 1991, when university experts put forth "The French Paradox" -- the apparent incongruity that the French, despite their rich diets, suffer only half the heart disease of Americans. The conclusion: The red wine they drink helps keep their arteries clear.

Instantly, red wine's popularity in the United States quadrupled. Wine even earned a place on the FDA's famous dietary pyramid for healthy eating (and now drinking).

But even today, 10 percent of Americans drink 80 percent of the wine consumed in this country. Wine can't seem to shed its tuxedo-toting, stuffed-shirt image.

That might change in the 21st century, as younger Americans seek to make wine, at long last, hip. Wine X magazine, aimed at Generation X, for one, runs tasting notes that read more like newspaper personal ads. Its assessment of the 1994 Santa Alicia Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile: "Holly Hunter in a leather miniskirt." If wine can survive that, it'll be with us till the next millennium.