There are changes taking place all around the wine-producing world and those changes are almost completely consumer led. The wine industry is obviously based on personal taste and if those tastes change, then so must the industry if it's to satisfy consumer demand. Developments in the technology of making wine have had a major effect; more sterile environments during vinification have brought us more stable wines, less infected with off flavours than previously and consequently less sulphured and more intensely fruity.

Wine makers learnt millennia ago that cleanliness in the vinification process meant an increased certainty that the final product would be palatable. When I go home to my Italian valley I often watch my various cousins going through the age-old process of making wine. What they do is a long way from happens in the newly-built co-operative cantina down the road, but it's in a direct line of descent from the earliest wine-makers. In my valley the grapes are brought home in those funny little trailers pulled by the two-wheeled tractor. Inside the cantina a big, open-topped wooden barrel awaits with a capacity of about 1,000 litres. A wooden crusher is placed across the top, a device that looks like an old-fashioned wooden mangle. The grapes go into a hopper above the crusher and you turn the handle, letting the crushed grapes fall into the barrel. After a day or two the yeasts on the skins begin to digest the sugars in the must and fermentation begins. When it's over you rack the wine into 50 litre demijohns, where it sits until the following spring when it's racked again.

Every stage in this process is subject to infection, whether by bad strains of yeast, insects like the vinegar fly, or any one of a myriad bacteria. All of these affect the taste of the wine, and only rigorous cleanliness can keep them all at bay. This is a great deal easier to achieve in a controlled and sterile environment like that of a modern winery, than in a cantina in the basement of farmhouse. So farmhouse wines can be a hit and miss affair, sometimes exquisite in their simple purity, sometimes almost undrinkable.

But it's in the modern winery that the wine-makers can create exactly the sort of wine they want with no interference from the predatory natural world. Increasingly that wine is fruity, has a strong bouquet, can be drunk young, needs no decanting and can be enjoyed at once without having the breathe first. Traditional areas with traditional tastes are changing their style in accord with the new demands. Muscadet has become less tart, white Bordeaux less severe - old habits are being replaced with new techniques.

Wine of the Week

Chateau de Sours, Rose 2001

This 17th century Bordeaux Chateau has been transformed since 1990 with the construction of a new winery with temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks. The result has been a new range of wines, from a classic claret to a crisp white, to the delightful rose. The rose is 13%, is a pretty blush colour, and has a fullness that's unexpected. A real summer treat, should we ever get one.

Red, white and rose widely available, RRP under €15