Wine grapes worth discovering

New York

IN the distant, cobwebbed past of the early 1980s, when I was first learning about wine, the choices were not so different from what they had been 100 years before.

Within the sparse selections that passed for restaurant wine lists back then, you would find, depending on the food, Bordeaux and Burgundy, Champagne and sherry, or Chiantis and a few other Italian wines. Californian bottles were there, too, as the state emerged from the thrall of the "burgundy" and "chablis" jug wine era. Anything else was conveniently lumped together as "other". The exponential change in the past 35 years has been astounding. Even as recently as 2000, a wine like gruener veltliner was unknown in the United States. Now, this Austrian white is a staple in many restaurants across the country, something to embrace if facing a list of newer and still obscure bottles.