Thinking back on 2006, I find a modest wine at the forefront of my memory — not because it was great, but because it delivered a welcome surprise. It was a bottle of Chateau Bel Air 1999, an unsung, inexpensive, red Bordeaux from the haut-médoc that a person not into wine once brought to dinner. My nose was up in the air over that bottle, and it hung out on my wine rack for more than a year.

Finally, I got rid if it by slipping it into a case of wine destined for a friend’s book party in a Chelsea art gallery. Good riddance, I thought — until a partygoer insisted that I try a terrific red wine. It was the Bel Air, of course. And when I poured myself a glass, it really was terrific: a fragrant, ripe, and lively wine, round with Merlot fruit, at the peak of its life. This year, instead of giving away Bel Air, I’ll be buying it for my own parties ($14.99 for the 2003 vintage at Zachys).

BURGUNDY BUZZ I expect to drink my share of Pommard in 2007, too. It’s solid, deep, and a heavy treader in the glass when young. Call it the muscular side of pinot noir. As red Burgundy goes, Pommard is not excessively priced. At a tasting of 20 Pommards from 2003 and 2004 organized by the Wine Media Guild at Felidia last week, vintage differences were sharp. Wines from the blazing hot summer of 2003 were fleshy and funky, while those from cooler 2004 boasted fresher aromas and leaner flavor profiles. It would be a shame to choose only one or the other. One reason that wine holds our interest, year in and year out, is that it reflects the quirks of its growing season. Vive la difference!

From 2003, the triumphs of the Pommard tasting were a trio of premier crus from Domaine de Courcel: Pommard Fremiets ($60 from klwines.com), Pommard Rugiens ($71 from popswine.com), and Pommard Epenots (a bargain at $57 from popswine.com). These wines were potent and rich, yet not flabby. From the 2004 vintage, my favorites were Olivier Leflaive’s lively basic Pommard ($45 at 67wine.com) and the class act of tasting, Comte Armand’s Pommard Close des Epéneaux ($58 at stirlingfinewine.com). The wines of Pommard traditionally require long maturing, but all these examples can be pleasurably poured on an icy night this winter, if one ever comes.

REMEMBERED Last year was kind to almost all the world’s wine regions — and cruel to too many key figures who made, promoted, and wrote about wine in both hemispheres. Closest to home, California lost a pair of pioneers who in the 1960s notched up the quality of American wines: Saskatchewan-born Al Brownstein, 87, and Washington-born Rodney Strong, 78. At Napa Valley’s Diamond Creek, Brownstein showed that geologically different hillside vineyard blocs in close proximity could produce cabernet sauvignon of markedly different character. And so the French concept of terroir took root in Napa Valley.

Strong, meanwhile, was planting Sonoma’s first vineyard designated wine, the burly Alexander’s Crown Cabernet Sauvignon. Its first release was the great 1974 vintage. Mr. Strong had another distinction: While lots of California winemakers switched from other careers, he may have been the only one who had worked as a Broadway dancer.

In Australia, the death in August of Len Evans at age 75 was overshadowed, three weeks later, by the loss of Steve Irwin. Evans was to Australian wine what Irwin was to croc-hunting: iconic in his enthusiasm and knowledge and a bigger-than-life promoter of his country. Relocating from England to Sydney in 1955, Evans was first a wine journalist and author before creating the Rothbury Estate winery in Hunter Valley. He was an international wine competition judge, and he never relented in pushing Aussies to make better wine.

In the midst of last September’s harvest, Burgundy’s most renowned winemaker, Henri Jayer, died at 84. He was born in Vosne-Romanée, a village blessed with some of Burgundy’s most prestigious vineyards. Jayer showed lazier local winemakers that by upgrading vineyard practices, including ruthlessly reducing grape yields, the quality of pinot noir could be increased. The intense, long-lived wine from his tiny Cros Parantoux vineyard is more sought after, and higher priced, than many loftier wines ranked in Burgundy’s official classification. “If you have only water on the table, you’ll just talk politics,” Jayer once said. “On the other hand, a great wine will focus everyone’s attention and you’ll only talk of it!”

Alexis Bespaloff, the wine writer who died last April at 71, was equal parts gentle, funny, and erudite. Back in the days when we both hand-delivered stories to New York magazine in its early years, I fell into easy conversation with him around the office, picking up whatever wine tidbits I could. Bespaloff’s 1988 revision of Frank Schoonmaker’s “Wine Encyclopedia” and his 1977 “Fireside Book of Wine” remain, despite their age, relevant and pleasurable. They’ll always be on my bookshelf.