Shortly after I began writing a wine column in 1976, a friend teased me about my avocation. We were journalists working at The Associated Press, and he probably didn’t mean to be disparaging when he said, “All red wines taste the same.” Not a very journalistic approach. Since I had never known him to take even a sip of wine, I assumed that he reflected millions of others who had the same observation, which was they never saw much difference between any of the red wines to which they had been exposed. I didn’t think much about the remark at the time, though I found it naive. But he may have been right. In 1976, many of the wines were homogenous. There probably wasn’t an awful lot of difference between the numerous varietals to which we were all exposed. By the mid-1980s, as wine quality began to improve markedly, I …