One of the questions I’m most often asked, along with where my name comes from (see the long version of my bio if by any chance you are interested), is ‘Which are the up-and-coming wine regions I should look out for?’
We’ve been banging on about Portuguese reds and Greek whites for years, but now, much to my delight, Portuguese whites and Greek reds have caught up. I even found a good Portuguese traditional-method sparkling wine from Caves Transmontanas recently, evidence that the Douro Valley produces so much more than port, even if it is facing an existential crisis because grape prices hardly cover production costs, and there is a growing shortage of people prepared to work the valley’s steep slopes in its harsh climate.
But good wines are coming from all over the country. Pricing is all over the place, with the more famous producers managing to command quite robust prices, not least because of Portugal’s thriving tourist trade, but there are also bargains aplenty.
We wine nerds have become accustomed to enjoying the nervy wines of Spain’s volcanic Canary Islands but Portugal now has a riposte in the form of the wines grown in the extraordinary landscape on the volcanic island of Pico in the Azores. Its lattices of dry-stone walls recall Ireland’s Aran Islands – but in this case vines crawl within each tiny plot. Most of the wines are tense, slightly saline dry whites, typically made from the indigenous Arinto dos Açores or Verdelho vines.
The Spanish mainland, which should not be quite so drought-plagued in the wake of the awful recent rains there, also has many an up-and-coming region. (See this World Atlas of Wine overview map of Spain.) Aragón, sandwiched in wine terms between Rioja and Navarra to the west and Catalunya to the east, is home to an undiscovered wealth of old vines in zones such as Campo de Borja, Calatayud, Cariñena, IGP Valdejalón and Vino de la Tierra Ribera del Queiles. Typical of Aragón wine is the produce of ancient Garnacha vines on a scale from delicate and fragrant to hearty.
As for Greek wines, Santorini is the island most frequently associated with fine Greek whites but tourist development is annually encroaching on Santorini’s ancient vineyards and the 2024 harvest was pathetically small because of heat, drought and hail. And these wines were never cheap. As an alternative I would recommend the island of Crete, currently a fantastic source of Greek wine value, both red and white. The local Vidiano and Vilana vines are extremely productive and Cretan grapes are still inexpensive. This may not last.
On the Greek mainland the widely planted Xinomavro grape yields pale but interesting, grainy-textured reds, notably in the Naoussa region, and is also enjoying its moment in the sun, with some wine lovers finding it a less expensive alternative to the Nebbiolo grape of Barolo and Barbaresco.
I’ve also been extremely impressed recently by some Cypriot wines – especially those based on the island’s characteristic Xynisteri white wine grape. And the indigenous Maratheftiko vine can produce some fine reds on the island, too.
At the same tasting that convinced me of the revolution in Cypriot wines, I was even more impressed by the quality of Croatian wine today, but I see all too little of it in the UK. I could say the same thing about two other countries showing their wines at that tasting, Czechia and Slovakia, where there is so much interesting progress and experimentation but it was Tam who had the pleasure of tasting those particular wines.
The Chinese wine scene seemed on fire earlier this century but various factors such as statistical rigour and severe lockdowns, not to mention President Xi’s crackdown on gifting and counterfeit wines, have all served to shrink the figures on how much wine China is producing and consuming.
However, signs are that the quality of Chinese wine has been increasing significantly, and China has joined the official international wine and vine organisation known as the OIV – quite a big deal. It may be some time before China is much of a wine exporter; the number of potential consumers on the domestic market militates against that. But those who fly Cathay Pacific will now find six hand-picked Chinese wines in first and business class, a sign of much improved times in vineyards and cellars all over China.
In the last two years, I see I have tasted only 18 Chinese wines, many of them from Silver Heights in Ningxia, but they were all extremely respectable – much better than the wines I tasted on my first few trips to China in the early years of this century.
However, my colleague and fellow Master of Wine Richard Hemming recently tasted 37 promising Chinese wines during 48 hours in Shanghai (see The Singapour – November 2024). These included not just the red Bordeaux blends that utterly dominated Chinese wine culture a decade ago but also a decent array of whites, even a pet-nat, and reds including Pinot Noir, Barbera, Tempranillo, Syrah and the Marselan grape of which Chinese wine producers have become especially fond.
A sub-Himalayan area in the north-west of the province of Yunnan, not all that far from the memorably renamed city of Shangri-La, is rapidly being recognised as a hotspot for ambitious red wine growing, but the province of Ningxia south-west of Beijing got there first, helped enormously by the encouragement of the local government. Emma Gao of Silver Heights is just one of a virtual army of accomplished female winemakers there.
And wine-interested China-watchers should not forget Mongolian Icewine. Winters with the requisite sub-zero temperatures are a given here, whereas winters have been warming up in Canada, whose modern wine export drive was virtually based on its ability to produce substantial quantities of sweet Icewine made from frozen grapes.
Ontario may be Canada’s longest-established wine-producing province, but some promising wines have been emerging from Québec and, especially, Nova Scotia. On the other side of the country, British Columbia’s most famous region the Okanagan Valley has suffered enormously recently from the effects of climate change, but somewhere to look out for is the much more maritime Vancouver Island. The global wine superpower Jackson Family Wines has been investing here.
Things are happening south of the United States, too. As I discovered in April 2023, the quality of Mexican wines has been increasing by leaps and bounds. Interesting, even first-class, wine is made in the country’s wide range of terroirs, including at elevations that rival those of Argentine vineyards high up in the Andes. Like China, Mexico has not exported much wine and that situation is hardly likely to change during the forthcoming Trump era, but visitors to this vibrant country are recommended to look out for the names below.
The most dramatic changes to the map of the world’s wine regions as a result of our generally warming planet have been in northern Europe. Not just England, Belgium and the Netherlands, but Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia all have thriving communities of wine producers (for a brief overview of each, see those countires' entries in The Oxford Companion to Wine). Fruit wines and hybrids have been more traditional than grape-based wines but grapevines are steadily gaining ground. On joining the EU in 1995, Finland chose to forfeit official status as a wine producer in exchange for farm subsidies, so you won’t find the word ‘wine’ on bottles of fermented grape juice there.
Of the wines lauded above, probably the easiest to find outside their countries of origin are those of Iberia and Greece.
Each for different reasons, the wine producers of Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and Turkey are currently working under the most difficult conditions and deserve all the support we can give. Less up-and-coming, more seriously threatened.
Some producers to look out for
Portugal – Barca Velha (Casa Ferreirinha), Susana Esteban, Herdade do Rocim, António Maçanita, Hugo Mendes, Niepoort, Luis Pato, Quinta de la Rosa, Quinta do Crasto, Luis Seabra, Wine & Soul
Canary Islands – Borja Pérez, Envinate, Suertes del Marqués, Tamerán, Victoria Torres Pesis
Pico – Azores Wine Company
Aragón – Alto Moncayo, El Escocés Volante, Frontonio, Garage Wine Club, Mas de Mancuso
Crete – Douloufakis, Economou, Lyrarakis
Mainland Greece and other islands – Alpha Estate, Argyros, Hatzidakis, Oeno P, Skouros, Thymiopolous, T-Oinos
Cyprus – Kyperounda, Zambartas
Croatia – Fakin, Koslović, Matošević, Stina, Vislander
China – Ao Yun, Helan Qingxue, Long Dai, Muxin, Silver Heights, XiaoLing, Xige
Vancouver Island – Unsworth
Mexico – Don Leo, El Cielo, Monte Xanic, Puerta del Lobo, Vereda de Plata, Vinos de la Erre
Tasting notes, scores, suggested drinking dates for wines from almost all of these producers can be found in our tasting notes database. For international stockists, see Wine-Searcher.com.
Image from Douloufakis of Crete's website.
