Unusual wine regions are the ones that don’t turn up on the label of every bottle at the till — Cangas rather than Rioja, the Klein Karoo rather than Stellenbosch, Río Negro rather than Mendoza. An unusual wine region, as I use the phrase on the shop floor, is simply a place making genuinely good wine that hasn’t yet earned a household name. By the end of this you’ll know how to pick one worth your money, how to serve what you buy, and when you’re better off just reaching for something familiar instead.
What makes a wine region ‘unusual’?
It isn’t really about the map. It’s about what’s missing: name recognition, a big export budget, a place on the supermarket shelf. Some of these regions go back a long way — vines have grown in parts of Asturias for centuries, with some local accounts tracing early plantings inland to monastic vineyards long before anyone thought to write the history down properly. Others are properly new, pushed into being by warmer summers and cheaper land, which is how you end up with vineyards in places that would have seemed absurd a generation ago.
Trade coverage over the past decade keeps landing on the same theme: winemakers are working further from the traditional 30–50 degree latitude bands than they used to, chasing cooler pockets or simply proving a point. Bulgaria has quietly gone from volume production toward small, quality-led estates. Moldova and Moravia sit just out of most people’s mental map of Europe, even though they’ve been making wine the whole time you’ve been ignoring them. None of that is exotic for its own sake — it’s just wine, made somewhere you haven’t been told to expect it.
There’s a temptation, when a region is unfamiliar, to assume it must be either a bargain or a gimmick. It’s neither, most of the time. It’s just a place further down the queue for attention, and attention is a slow, unfair thing that has very little to do with what’s actually in the glass. I’ve poured plenty of wine from famous postcodes that bored me stiff, and plenty from places I couldn’t have found on a map five years ago that stopped a table’s conversation dead. That’s really the only test worth applying.
Which unusual wine regions should you actually try first?
Start with a region built on a grape you can’t buy anywhere else — that’s the fastest way to taste something genuinely different rather than a familiar style with an unfamiliar postmark. Cangas in Asturias, the Aveyron in south-west France and the high slopes of Lebanon’s Batroun are three good doors in. Each has kept, or revived, something the rest of the wine world walked away from.
Cangas is the one I’d send you to first if you like a story with your bottle. A small handful of wineries work this most southerly, most isolated corner of Asturias, sheltered from the north winds and cut off enough that Tempranillo and Cabernet never really got a foothold there. What survived instead are old Asturian varieties that barely exist anywhere else. It’s not a pretty region so much as a dramatic one — steep, slow, closer to the Middle Ages than the motorway.
The Aveyron, an IGP inside south-west France, is quieter but just as interesting. Winemakers here, both inside and outside the small appellations of Marcillac, Entraygues and Estaing, are working with local varieties like Négret de Banhars and Rousselet alongside the mainstream grapes, and vines have started reappearing in parts of the département that had gone without them for a generation. If you enjoy the Rioja and beyond guide for the same reason — regions rebuilding an identity around old vines — this scratches the same itch.
Lebanon deserves a mention on its own terms. High-elevation whites there were something of an afterthought for years; now Obeideh and Merwah, the indigenous grapes, are being taken seriously in both varietal bottlings and blends, with small producers in Batroun and above the Bekaa Valley pushing into skin-fermented styles nobody expected from the country. Further south, in Andalucía, the IGP Vino de la Tierra de Cádiz is quietly making unfortified, flor-aged whites from Palomino Fino — sherry’s DNA, minus the fortification, plus a red side in Tintilla de Rota that most people have never tasted.
Patagonia, in Argentina’s far south — Río Negro, Neuquén and the tiny plantings of Chubut — is worth knowing simply because it breaks the mental picture of Argentine wine as hot and dry. It’s cooler and wetter than Mendoza, shaped by a river running through a green canyon walled in by desert, and it’s attracted serious old-vine projects precisely because the conditions are so different from the rest of the country. None of this is a substitute for the classics. It’s a companion to them, and honestly a bit of a relief when you’ve had one too many bottles that all taste like they were made to a brief.
Are wines from unusual regions worth the money?
Mostly yes, but unevenly — some of the most interesting bottles I’ve poured in the shop cost less than a supermarket Malbec, and a few cost more than they probably should. Value here tends to come from low name recognition rather than low quality, but small production and hand-harvesting in places like Cap Corse or the Klein Karoo can push prices up too. Taste before you commit to a case.
The honest trade-off with unusual regions is the lack of scaffolding. A region like Comté Tolosan, the wide IGP that covers much of south-west France, doesn’t have decades of appellation rules doing quality control for you the way Bordeaux or Chablis does — so the range you find in a shop like mine can run from genuinely superb to fairly ordinary within the same postcode. That’s not a flaw exactly. It’s just the price of a place still finding its own shape, and it means the winemaker’s hand matters more than the label’s reputation.
Where you do tend to find real value is in old-vine material nobody’s marketing yet. Maule, in Chile’s Central Valley, has a rich heritage of old-vine Carignan, País and Muscat that’s only recently started getting the attention it deserves — vines that would be treated as gold dust in Barossa or Priorat. If you want to understand how to spot that kind of value on a label before you buy, it’s worth reading how to buy wine like a merchant alongside this — the same instincts apply whether the label says Chablis or Cangas.
I’d also say: don’t assume cheap means safe and expensive means good, here more than anywhere. I’ve had a customer once turn down a £9 Cádiz white because he assumed it couldn’t be serious at that price, then come back a fortnight later asking for six more once he’d actually tried it. Reputation costs money. Wine doesn’t always need it.
How do you drink wine from a region you’ve never heard of?
Exactly the way you’d drink anything else — chill the whites, let the tannic reds breathe, and don’t overthink it. The one difference is you can’t lean on reputation to guess the style before you open it, so ask your merchant what to expect, or read the back label properly for once. A bit of curiosity does more work here than any fancy glassware.
A few practical notes worth having in your pocket:
- Flor-aged Cádiz whites want to be served properly cold, the way you’d treat a fino — they’re built for freshness, not for sitting in a warm room.
- Rustic Cangas reds are food wines through and through; think of the hearty, slow-cooked dishes that would have been on the table in that part of Asturias for generations, not a delicate starter.
- Corsican Rappu, the rare sweet red from Cap Corse made from Aleatico, is a small-glass wine — pour it like a dessert wine, not a table red.
- Lebanese skin-contact whites have enough texture and grip to sit alongside the same spiced, herb-heavy dishes you’d reach for with an orange wine from anywhere else.
- Old-vine Maule reds are sturdy enough to take a bit of decanting time, even though nothing about the label will tell you that.
None of this needs a special occasion. Half the fun of an unusual bottle is opening it on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, with whatever’s already on the hob — a stew that’s been going since lunchtime, or just some bread and cheese and no particular plan.
What do these bottles have in common with the classics — and what’s different?
They’re made the same way, mostly — fermented, aged, bottled by people who care. What’s different is the safety net. A Chablis producer having an off vintage still sells the bottle on the name. A grower in the Aveyron doesn’t get that luxury, which tends to keep standards honest even when the marketing budget is zero.
| Region | Grape / style | Closest classic comparison | Why it’s worth a look |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cangas, Asturias | Local Asturian reds | Rustic, savoury Northern Rioja | Untouched by Tempranillo or Cabernet |
| Cádiz, Andalucía | Flor-aged Palomino Fino | Unfortified fino sherry | Sherry character without the fortification |
| Aveyron, SW France | Négret de Banhars, Rousselet | Rustic South-West blends | Local varieties genuinely reviving |
| Cap Corse, Corsica | Muscat, Rappu (Aleatico) | Sweet fortified Rhône Muscats | A near-forgotten sweet red style |
| Klein Karoo, South Africa | Port-style, fortified Muscat | Douro fortified wines | Brandy-industry heritage turning to table wine |
| Granite Belt, Queensland | ‘Strange Bird’ alt varieties | Northern Italian alt-variety regions | Australia’s own alternative-grape playground |
If you already enjoy the alternative-variety mindset behind Italy’s hundreds of native grapes — the same spirit that runs through Italy’s great reds — most of this table will feel like familiar territory wearing an unfamiliar coat. That’s worth sitting with for a second: the appeal isn’t novelty for its own sake, it’s watching a familiar idea — a wine built around one grape and one place — play out somewhere the story hasn’t been told yet.
Questions customers ask us
Is unusual wine always natural or low-intervention? Not necessarily, though there’s overlap — a lot of these regions attracted winemakers precisely because land was cheap and rules were loose, which suits low-intervention styles. Plenty of conventional winemaking happens in unusual regions too.
Will I find these on a big retailer’s list? Occasionally — a few independent merchants and specialist online lists have been quietly building sections around exactly this kind of bottle for years, well before the larger supermarket chains caught on. Smaller lists tend to move faster than big chains here, partly because they don’t need volume to make a range worthwhile.
Do unusual regions only make red wine? No — some of the most exciting work right now is in whites: Lebanese Obeideh and Merwah, flor-aged Palomino from Cádiz, cool-climate Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc from small plots in South Africa’s Klein Karoo mountains.
Should I buy a case, or just one bottle? One bottle first, always, with anything unfamiliar. Even within a single region quality can swing wildly — that’s the trade-off for the lack of a big reputation propping things up.
The merchant’s last word
I still remember the first Cangas red I ever poured for a customer — she assumed it was a mistake, that I’d mislabelled a Rioja. It wasn’t. That’s the whole appeal of unusual wine regions for me: the surprise still works, even after years of doing this for a living. Come and have a look through browse the South West France cellar and let’s find you something the rest of the shelf hasn’t heard of yet.
