Good (wine) news from America

Perhaps I was moving in extremely selective circles during my recent trip to the West Coast but I kept coming across promising signs that wine was increasingly being accepted into the mainstream of American culture – something I had not noticed on any previous trip to the US.

For a start, the American wine writer Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, has managed to raise the million dollars needed to make a major 13-part tv series on (consuming not producing) wine which is planned to air nationally on PBS from September. She also reports that her wine courses at...