(NYTines) - Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon is America’s best-known wine. It may also be the most divisive.

Whether people drink it regularly or hardly at all, they almost always have strong opinions. Many Americans love it, collect it, invest in it, drink it to the exclusion of other wines and feel proud of its recognition worldwide. Others have no use for it. They don’t drink it, which doesn’t stop them from saying they don’t like it. Many seem to have a narrow definition of Napa cabernet that they believe fits all examples of the genre. About the only point on which almost everybody agrees is that it’s expensive.

Welcome back to Wine School, where tenaciously held stereotypes about wine are regarded with suspicion. At the beginning of each month, I select a type of wine and recommend a few good examples. You try to find one or more of those bottles and, over the course of the month, drink the wine in a relaxed, natural setting, with food and friends or family.

The aim is to examine that wine closely, not through a quick taste but by drinking it over time and carefully observing its evolution. What is it like immediately on opening the bottle? What about after it’s been exposed to the air? When it’s warmed up, or cooled off? Does food completely change the equation?

Many people have been thrilled to discover wines that they had ignored or simply didn’t know. Others have used Wine School as an opportunity to reconsider wines that they had previously dismissed. Even a wine you don’t enjoy, I believe, has something to offer if it helps to articulate what you do like in a wine.

The association of Napa Valley with cabernet sauvignon is powerful. Many are surprised that it comes from anywhere else in California. Sonoma makes superb examples, while perhaps California’s greatest cabernet, Ridge Monte Bello, comes from the Santa Cruz Mountains. But Napa is by far the dominant cabernet region.

Surprisingly, perhaps, given Napa’s history as a wine region stretching back into the mid-19th century, this association with cabernet did not solidify until fairly recently. While a few wineries like Beaulieu Vineyard and Inglenook were making great cabernets before World War II, Napa Valley was more of a mixed growing area, with plenty of riesling, zinfandel and other, lesser-known grapes. When I first visited Napa as a child in 1968, my family tasted wines made from esoteric grapes like green Hungarian and charbono. Nary a mention of cabernet.