My friend Peter Thustrup, a rare wine specialist living in Provence, has owned Picassos as well as precious wine. Now he sticks to the wines only. “When you have expensive paintings on the wall,” Mr. Thustrup explained, “you have to insure them. When you have expensive wines, you drink them. And then you have the good memories. You don’t pay premiums on that.”

I couldn’t agree more with those hardnosed sentiments, especially as I add up personal memories made over bottles of wine in the year now ending. The strongest of them are rarely about the wine alone. People and places need to figure in if the memory is to be lasting.

I didn’t predict a memorable evening on the first Sunday of last February, when I headed off to have dinner with a California vineyard owner named Andy Beckstoffer. The wines on the table, I’d been told, would be cabernet sauvignons from a hallowed and historic vineyard called To Kalon in the Napa Valley. Mr. Beckstoffer had recently won a legal battle with the Mondavi family, owners of the larger portion of the vineyard (they call it Tokalon), over the right to use that name on his portion of the vineyard. These wines we’d be sampling were sure to be intense, tannic and hard-charging. Frankly, I wasn’t in the mood.

I met Mr. Beckstoffer at the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, which was rather empty that night. The trio of cabs on the table were from Schrader, Paul Hobbs, and Behrens & Hitchcock, each a boutique winery using To Kalon grapes purchased from Mr. Beckstoffer. This driven man talked about his belief that terroir (a particular piece of earth and nature’s impact on it) is as important in California as in France, home of the concept. And the three wines made his point for him. As expected, they flexed muscles like those of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. What I hadn’t expected was how these wines layered in so many flavors of dark fruits and wood fire smoke. Each wine had its own contours, but their cores were firey To Kalon.

Without Mr. Beckstoffer across the table, I wouldn’t have appreciated these intense cabs so much. Without them, neither would I have appreciated the intense Mr. Beckstoffer. As dogs often seem to resemble their masters, these wines resembled theirs. The wines, of course, were anything but dogs. I’ll long remember that dinner.

Last April, I spent a week in South Africa at the national wine showcase called Cape Wine 2004. So many wines get poured at such an event that they begin to blur into a single mighty mass. So I was grateful to take time out, on a Sunday morning, to go surfing with a winemaker named Eben Sadie. We caught waves for a few hours at Muizenberg Beach on the Indian Ocean. Then we headed into the rugged hills of Swartland, an hour to the north, to the Sadie Family Vineyard. The winery was a simple, whitewashed shed at the base of a rocky slope planted with shiraz grapes. “Poor soil makes rich wines,” said Mr. Sadie.

The beach had been balmy but here in the chilly, thick-walled shed, amidst rows of new French oak barrels, I felt goose bumps on my still-salty arms. And then I tasted two wines made with infinite care and in minute quantities by Mr. Sadie, and I forgot about being cold. One was a red called Columella (Zachys sells this for $60), the other a white called Palladius. They struck a deft balance between Old World minerality and New World fruit. Their haunting purity was all their own. But I don’t think I would have been alert to them if the waves hadn’t washed my brain and palate clean.

Expensive wines aren’t the only ones that make memories. Even modest Beaujolais can nourish them, as I realized after taking my family to a Saturday brunch at Capsouto Freres in TriBeCa last month, in preparation for a column on the release of Beaujolais Nouveau 2004. It might have been just your average brunch washed down by a bottle of the new wine – if elder frere Jacques Capsouto had not noticed my interest in Beaujolais. He first proposed a rarely seen white beaujolais that he’d sourced directly from the grower. Augmenting our DuBoeuf “Beaujo Nouveau,” featured on the menu, Mr. Capsouto insisted that we try two other bottlings not yet listed. And then he sent over a taste of a more serious “cru” Beaujolais from 2003.

We sipped and chatted about the wines and the rolling Beaujolais country which Mr. Capsouto adores. We even talked about politics. Our 90-minute brunch effortlessly rolled on for an extra hour. My wife and daughter were losing time allotted to shopping, but who cared? Though the memory of that lunch on Beaujolais Time is still fresh, I don’t think it will fade.

Wine can even make a joyful memory out of a minor catastrophe. It happened on my birthday, not long after Susan and I were married, when she cooked a favorite dish for my birthday dinner: a puree of potatoes and salt cod, baked in an old French earthenware dish that I treasured. As dinner was about to be served, I heard a crash in the kitchen. I found dinner all over the floor, the dish in shards, and Susan in tears.

“This calls for the best bottle in the house,” I said. Out of a closet came a bottle of Musigny 1961 made by the Comte de Vogue, the very best that Burgundy can offer. I’d brought it back from Paris years earlier. Until that evening, no dinner had seemed quite august enough to warrant uncorking the wine. Now, unexpectedly, the hour had arrived. After cleaning up the kitchen floor, just the two of us sipped that stupendous Musigny, perfectly aged at just over 20 years, with salad, a baguette, and good French cheese. It was all we had, and all we needed. The night only got better from there. I remember it well, but will never tell.