Japan Towards the end of the 20th century, long before Chinese wine drinkers hove into view, Japan was viewed as an exciting potential market by the world’s fine-wine producers. Today, however, Japan has been becoming a wine producer of note itself with almost 500 producers all over the archipelago. Most producers are very small-scale, and have to battle a distinctly unfavourable climate marked by summer typhoons and monsoons, but the refined Japanese palate ensures high standards. The particularly pure whites based on the thick-skinned pink grape speciality Koshu have been promoted abroad for almost 20 years and on my last visit there in 2025 I was particularly taken by the exuberantly fruity Japanese red-wine speciality grape Muscat Bailey A. The Institute of Masters of Wine has always organised field trips but the one to Japan that took place last month was the most popular so far. Expect to see more Japan wine (see explanation of nomenclature) on lists and shelves.
Keller From 2001, ninth-generation Klaus Peter Keller has enriched the foundations of the family wine estate to such an extent that its wines now command some of Germany’s highest prices for complex dry Rieslings and red wines heavily influenced by friends in Burgundy. With his local contemporary Philipp Wittmann, he and his wife Julia transformed the image of his native Rheinhessen from a source of unremarkable grapes for Liebfraumilch to one of the country’s most exciting wine regions. Weingut Keller, ambitious, family-run and determined to fine-tune its viticultural methods every year, is the only one ever voted Winery of the Decade by the influential Gault & Millau Wine Guide Deutschland. More than 50 apprentices have gone on to disseminate the Keller attention to detail such as high-density plantings and hard, hands-on work in the vineyard. Not to be confused with Franz Keller of Baden, another fine German producer.
Lawrence Wine Estates Since 2018 agro-billionaire Gaylon Lawrence of Tennessee, originally from Arkansas, has gobbled up some of Napa’s most hallowed wineries, plus Margaux second growth Château Lascombes in Bordeaux. Controversially, the man he put in charge of a portfolio that includes the historic Heitz Cellar and Stony Hill, which in the last century produced some of Napa Valley’s most admired reds and whites respectively, is not a local but a Master Sommelier from Aspen who promises, according to the website, to ‘craft a new narrative in the Napa Valley’. (Subtext: the rest of you are doing it all wrong.) I tasted the first offerings from the group’s Ink Grade, a dramatic mountain site on the valley’s east side for which a plush tasting room has been constructed on the valley’s main highway. They certainly didn’t conform to the overblown stereotype of Napa Cabernet but arguably went austerely too far in the other direction. Today, the group’s offer of ‘a suite of meaningful luxury experiences amid grand terroirs’, includes a Heitz vineyard tour and tasting for $350 per person. As for other California wine producers, there have been layoffs and consolidation.
Microbial terroir Terroir, the specific character of an environment taking into account climate, soil and topography, was much discussed towards the end of the last century – and finally admitted to be a global rather than specifically French or European phenomenon. But current science suggests that a much smaller-scale environment may vary enormously and play a part in influencing wine character and quality, too. Just like the human microbiome in our gut, individual vineyards seem to have their own particular cocktail of microscopic fungi and bacteria which may help shape the wine made from them, especially if fermentation is spontaneous, rather than the result of adding cultured yeast. See the Oxford Companion entry on microbial terroir. Tangentially, Greystone in New Zealand have been highlighting the difference between wines fermented in the vineyard and the same grapes fermented in the winery.
No-alcohol wine substitutes The holy grail for wine companies currently, not least in the UK where taxes are now directly related to alcohol content, is to develop a drink that tastes like wine but contains zero alcohol. I have yet to encounter such a thing but I have found some alcohol-free drinks that might appeal to wine drinkers, as outlined in How to drink less wine. Just after I wrote that article none other than Sir Elton John entered this potentially lucrative alcohol-free wine-substitute space. Elton John Zero is glamorously packaged like a bottle of champagne and labelled Blanc de Blancs, just like an all-Chardonnay champagne. Sainsbury’s, since joined by all the other UK supermarkets, offered it at £10 a bottle as a ‘wine-based drink’, which is not strictly true. The ingredients in this admirably dry liquid are: ‘Carbonated Water, Non-Alcoholic Fermented Chardonnay Grape Concentrate, Acids (Tartaric Acid, Citric Acid), Antioxidant (Ascorbic Acid), Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate, Dimethyl Dicarbonate), Natural Flavourings, Natural Premium Green Tea Extract’. The concentrated Veneto Chardonnay is apparently fermented by proprietary bacteria – in Germany – rather than by the yeast that would produce alcohol.
Orange wine Nothing to do with citrus fruit, this is wine made in the same way as red wine, with extended contact between the fermenting juice and the grape skins, but from grapes more usually associated with white wines. It has become popular enough to warrant its own category on many wine lists and to have quite a following. Because grape skins are high in chewy tannins and colouring matter, orange wines are more astringent and deeper-coloured than regular white wines. Many a wine producer has had a go at making an orange wine but they are particularly common in Slovenia and Friuli just over the border in north-east Italy as well as in Georgia in the Caucasus where they are often called amber wines. According to a recent poll of UK retailers in the trade publication Drinks Retailing, demand for orange (and natural) wines may have reached a peak.
Prosecco The big (only?) commercial success in 21st-century wine, Prosecco now sells well over twice the total volume of champagne and far, far more than Spanish Cava. The total volume available was bolstered considerably in 2009 when the Italian authorities redrew the map to allow Prosecco production in virtually all of north-east Italy, and decreed that Prosecco was now the name of a protected geographical designation rather than a grape variety. A synonym, Glera, was adopted as the name of the grape. This means that, within Europe at least, only north-east Italians may use the name Prosecco (although Australian Prosecco is a thing Down Under). The big difference between Prosecco and the other famous sparkling wines such as champagne, Crémant and Cava is that most of it is made much more industrially. The vital second fermentation that creates the bubbles takes place in large tanks rather than individual bottles that then need to be handled and recorked individually to rid them of the sediment from that second fermentation. All that’s needed to clarify wines made sparking by the tank method is filtration. But wine drinkers don’t seem to mind. Annual sales of Prosecco increased from an estimated 120 million bottles in 2009 to 667 million bottles in 2025, when total champagne sales were 266 million bottles.
Quality This may seem a strange entry in this alphabet of wine but it is only in this century that quality has definitively overtaken quantity as the most desirable attribute in wine production. The wine market has been shrinking since its pandemic boost and is becoming increasingly competitive. As consumers become more knowledgeable and fastidious, only producers who can offer reasonable quality at a fair price are likely to survive.
Regenerative viticulture Organic was about minimising agrochemical use. Biodynamic harnessed plant-by-plant, sometimes cask-by-cask, attention according to the rhythms of the cosmos (and seems to result in superior wines even if we don’t know exactly how). And now regenerative viticulture has shifted the focus to the health of the soil, the importance of biodiversity and polyculture, and the need to nourish and improve the Earth rather than extracting from it. All in all this is a much-needed long-term view rather than the quantity-driven late-20th-century imperative. In French this approach is sometimes known as agroécologie.
Suggestions
Japan
Lumière, Orangé Sparkling Koshu Brut Nature 2022 Yamanashi 11%
£42 Amathus
Keller
Keller, von der Fels Riesling trocken 2024 Rheinhessen, Germany 12.5%
£40 Solent Cellar (the 2025 will be £38.50 when it arrives at Justerini & Brooks this summer)
Lawrence Group
Heitz Cellar Cabernet Sauvignon 2018 Napa Valley 13.8%
£100 Berry Bros & Rudd, widely available in the US from $62
Microbial terroir
Greystone, Organic Vineyard Ferment Syrah 2023 North Canterbury, New Zealand 13.5%
$NZ90 producer’s website
No-alcohol wine substitute
Water’s a pretty nice drink, inexpensive and awfully healthy
Orange wine
Amber Revolution by Simon J Woolf and Ryan Opaz (2018, Interlink)
See Tam’s book review and the Japan suggestion above
Prosecco
Bianca Vigna Brut NV Prosecco 11%
£17.10 Amathus
Quality
Take your pick!
Regenerative viticulture
Domaine Bousquet, Gaia Organic Malbec 2022 Tupungato, Argentina 14.5%
£15 (reduced from £18) Waitrose
For tasting notes, scores and suggested drinking dates for the wines above, see our tasting notes database. For international stockists, see Wine-Searcher.com.
