If you hang around the wine industry long enough – a mere few years should do the trick – you’re going to hear stories about a grape glut somewhere. The last go-round, just last year, involved France, namely the vast oversupply in Bordeaux, where the equivalent of 26 million bottles of wine from the 2004 vintage were distilled into industrial alcohol.

Now we hear about Australia’s glut. According to Wine Grape Growers Australia, which represents 3,500 growers across Australia, there’s 1 billion liters of unsold wine currently in storage in Australian wineries. This news comes right before Australia’s 2006 harvest, which begins next month. By all accounts, the 2006 harvest will equal or exceed the 2005 harvest, which was the biggest on record.

When you read these figures the eye tends to glaze over and the mind dulls.But that “1 billion liters” figure sticks in the head. Run the numbers, if you will. A case of wine – 12 bottles – is 9 liters. So 1 billion liters is – yikes! – more than 111 million cases of unsold wine. That’s a lot of unsold wine even by Australia’s big-league measure.

What does this mean for American consumers? Not much, if history is anything to go by. Unless the Aussies destroy their wine stocks a la France, which isn’t likely (they don’t have the European Union picking up the tab the way French growers do), we’ll see some quick deals in low-end Australian wine.

But judging by prior gluts of California wine – the last occurred in 2002 – it will pass in a flash. Gluts, like thunderstorms, always look ominous. But in healthy businesses – and the big Aussie wineries know their marketing – they disappear after a brief, contractive spasm.

So if you hear about the Great Australian Wine Glut, which you likely will in the next few months, take it with a blithe eye. In today’s world market, these things happen somewhere almost every year, as wine has become a global commodity. Besides, these gluts are rarely deluges of wines that are much good, anyway. They’re usually just cheap, overcropped bulk stuff.

HERE’S THE (REAL) DEAL

WARRE’S LATE-BOTTLED VINTAGE PORT 1995 This is the moment in the year when port becomes, if not essential, at least mighty attractive. Port is a tricky topic, as various sorts exist – ruby, tawny, vintage, late-bottled – and each port house has its version of these and other categories.

The top of the line is the fabled vintage port, which seems to make a cameo appearance in every 19th-century British novel. (It’s always in a decanter on the sideboard.) Famously long-lived, a good vintage port takes two decades to reach even early maturity and can soldier on for decades after that.

The late P. Morton Shand, one of the great English wine writers, was, unusually for a man of his silver-spoon class, no fan of port. Despite, or perhaps because of this, he put his finger on at least the sociological attraction of vintage port for the British upper classes:

“The gamest and biggest wines see out father, son, and grandson. … A properly matured port is rightly considered unequalled as the test of the pretensions of a county family to proper pride, patient manly endurance, Christian self-denial, and true British tenacity.”

Although great vintage ports are still made today, modernity and its relentless time pressures have encouraged port producers to accelerate port maturation.

Enter the modern category called late-bottled vintage port. This is wine version of “tastes like homemade!”Theoretically it’s possible to create a ready-to-drink port that does indeed taste like a true vintage port. But too often you get an indeterminate wine that’s uncomfortably close to a tired-tasting ruby port than anything reminiscent of the real vintage port experience.

Warre’s, to its great credit, is a shining exception. A famous port house (founded in 1670), Warre’s actually manages to pull off the neat trick of making a late-bottled vintage port taste, well, like what’s described.

The way they do this is by not cutting corners, which is the temptation with this category. First, the port is vintage-dated. They don’t issue this wine every year. The last one was 1992.

The key, of course, is the quality of the wine itself. If you want a wine to taste like a true vintage port, or close anyway, you’ve got to deliver the real goods.The flavor nuances and dimensionality of this wine suggest – and not just in this vintage – that Warre’s is willing to make the necessary quality investment.

Then comes the polishing.This port spends four years in cask (which takes off the rough edges) and another five years aged in bottle before being released. And, like true vintage port, it’s neither fined (an technique that removes fine particles by electrostatic attraction) nor filtered.

The result is impressive. It really does taste like a mature vintage port – or a pretty good approximation of one, anyway.You may not get the full stereophonic effect of a true vintage port that’s been laid in a frigid manor house cellar in the English countryside for several decades. But you can make out the tune without difficulty. That’s no small achievement. This is rich, dense, supple, dimensional port that will take the edge off winter or a tough day’s work – or both. Given its quality and aging, it’s a real deal at $29.95.