15 Wine Regions to Get to Know

(WinemakerMag) - People tend to stick to the familiar and pleasurable in life, and while there’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite Chardonnay or Zinfandel on a regular basis, remember the last time you tried a new varietal and were pleased by new and delicious flavors and aromas? It was probably an immediate addition to your favorites list. The same thing can apply to a new growing region. There are countries and viticultural areas that are doing terrifically exciting things, both with exotic native grapes and with familiar varietals, all cast in a completely different milieu than what you may be familiar with. Becoming familiar with a new region can be as revelatory and delightful as discovering that new varietal. 

Along with their favorites, most readers will be able to list quite a number of regions, both Old World and New. But there are other wine regions neither perfectly “new” or “old” world, but rather composed of old-world regions that have either never held the world stage for wine or have fallen off it from past glory, or new world regions that are newer-than-new, never having produced wine on a commercial scale before. 

One force behind these “new-old” and “new-new” regions is a sort of movement of winemakers, where a generation seems to have simultaneously determined that they would make wine in their home countries.