A field guide to low-intervention wine, region by region

Low-intervention wine has been fashionable long enough to have a backlash and a counter-backlash. Beneath both, the practical definition is stable: minimal additions, no fining or filtering, and sulphur measured in tens of parts per million rather than hundreds.

The Loire and the Beaujolais are where the modern movement was formalised in the 1980s, and both still produce its reference points. Prices for the named growers have followed the fashion upward.

Better value now sits at the edges: Bierzo and the Canaries in Spain, Etna and the Colli Piacentini in Italy, southern Moravia in the Czech Republic, and the Jura's less-known neighbours in the Bugey.

Georgia belongs in its own paragraph. Qvevri wine has been made in buried clay vessels for eight thousand years and was doing most of what the movement rediscovered, without the paperwork.

The advice for drinking it while travelling is the same everywhere. Ask what is open by the glass, say what you drank last and liked, and treat a slightly cloudy glass as information rather than a fault.