"Wine is made great by its ability to expose the curious drinker to different things that he or she didn't know existed, to take us to other lands and climates, to teach us history, and to enrich our knowledge of the world." I wrote those words last April, and they are as plain a confession of my love for wine as any I can dream up nine months later. Let me tell you a story. 

In the typical American telling of our individual stories, we tend to equate nationality with citizenship, not with ethnicity. Most of us descend from people who came from somewhere else, and many of our families have not -- in the grand sweep of time -- been here all that long. What makes America great?