Some years back, writing in another publication, I suggested (tongue only half in cheek as I’m wont to do), that they should carve the likeness of Robert Mondavi into the Stags Leap palisades, so he could overlook the Napa Valley forever. I now have another suggestion: Don’t you think it’s time to put the craggy visage of 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer up there too, in the crags alongside Bob, Mount Rushmore-style?

After all, Morley, as I call him, has become the true savior of wine, worthy of a monument. He came to be known as a wine-lover, at least we hoped against hope that he was, when he first filed a report for 60 Minutes in 1991 about what he termed “The French Paradox”. In the piece, he posited the question, Why do the French have less incidence of heart disease than do the Americans, even though the French diet is richer in fat? The answer, naturellement, was that it must be the wine.

Seventeen years later, there’s Morley again on the January 25 installment of the CBS classic, still very much alive and vital (it must be the wine), despite his face looking like that of a sharpay’s, and with red-rimmed eyes that look as though he might have had too much, well, red wine. This time, Morley focused on what many doctors have found over the last decade-and a-half, that it really must be a compound in the skins of red wine, called resveratrol – an anti-oxidant – that apparently is good for our hearts.

While Big Pharma falls all over itself trying to get approval for a pill laden with resveratrol, Safer’s report couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment for the beleaguered wine industry. At the end of January, winemakers, grape growers, and wine flacks were falling to the ground in agony all over the downtown area of Sacramento, California’s capital, bemoaning the fact that their industry was taking it in the shorts due to the economy. The blood-letting took on almost ritualistic qualities as panel after panel at the annual bacchanal that is the yearly Unified Wine & Grape Symposium beseeched us with cautionary tales of impending doom.

But then, just then, mythically riding in on his trusty but nonetheless broken down steed, comes Morley Safer and his epochal story that just might save the day, Mighty Mouse-style. While he did say in the piece that it would take about 1,000 bottles of red wine a day to keep the reaper at bay, most of us I’m sure - in our fashion of selective perception when we don’t want to hear something - ran right out to the kitchen cabinet and began slugging back that open bottle of red goodness. As though it was medicine; in fact, medicine that might help us live another day, and boy, does it tastes good, and makes us feel good at the same time. A miracle, indeed!

Well, I for one, can do 1,000 bottles a day while standing on my head and counting backwards, all the while singing “a thousand bottles of wine on the wall, a 1,000 bottles …” Who needs a pill? But you get my drift, right? Just as Morley’s first report back in ’91 was a singular factor in the ratcheting up of red wine sales a zillion percent, in a trend that persists to this day. I’m betting his second treatise will send sales of red soaring once again.

This, in spite of the economy; and in the face of Two Buck Chuck becoming Two-and-a-Half-Buck-Charlie because of some impending and threatening California state sin taxes that might get slapped on wine forthwith.

Ole Freddie Franzia down there in the Central Valley (whose pardon incidentally got turned down flat by Bush, who wanted to get out o’ town so fast and wanted nothing to do with pardoning FF from his past transgressions) will fast enough figure out a way to make more of the stuff. There won’t be enough Rubired to fill those orders.

In one of my economic-disaster dreams the other night, a spokesguy for FF tells me sotto voce and off-the-record, of course, that ole Freddie is meetin’ with his Buckin’ Broncos down there in Ceres, California as we speak, thinkin’ up names for the new resveratrol-laden product.

How’s ‘bout “Res Red” or “Ruby Red Reserve Resveratrol” or “AO Reddo” “packed with so much anti-oxidant it’ll make yer heart sing forever”?

When I wake up, I realize that we owe it all to good old, old Morley Safer. With his bust up there alongside Bob Mondavi’s, we’ll all be reminded that there sits a couple of true American heroes that did more for wine than anyone else. Don’t you think we should all be toasting them…with a glass of red, but of course.