A FEW weeks ago, I wrote about wines at the coveted intersection of high value and low price. I suggested that the greatest concentration of value, where you could find wines that were not merely palatable, but exciting, was in the $15 to $25 range. And I recommended 20 bottles at $20 that were the kinds of wines I would look forward to drinking any day of the week.

Mostly, the reaction was favorable. But several readers were indignant. “Only 3 out of 20 from North America?” one wrote in an e-mail. “Come on, Eric, we can do better than that.”

Finding good values in American wines is not easy. Unlike in the Old World, the wine industry in America did not evolve to make intriguing, inexpensive wines.

The United States does not have a centuries-old history of locally produced wines, so it cannot approach the sheer variety produced in Europe, where seemingly every valley has a local tradition of distinctive wines. When the American wine industry began in earnest in the 1960s, the imperative was national and even international. Grapes were selected on a desire to compete with the world’s best and to sell to distant markets.