In the space of six months, wine will have taken me to Brazil, China, Korea, Slovenia and a desert in New Mexico – places I never dreamt would be on the itinerary of even the most curious wine writer.

In place of the bordeaux and burgundy of 30 years ago, today’s wine drinker can choose a Chinese wine made with help from an Austrian who used to represent Robert Mondavi’s California wines in Europe, or an Indian one fashioned by Bordeaux’s most famous oenologist. “Almost anywhere in the world you think doesn’t make wine, does now,” says Simon Farr, deputy chairman and wine strategist at Bibendum Wine in London. Already involved in several wine ventures that are global in scope, he is just about to go to Baja, California, to work on a new project with a Mexican who also recently bought vineyards in the Agly Valley in French Catalonia.

And all this is without even mentioning Australia. As a wine producer the country was hardly countenanced in the 1970s, shot to international fame and fortune in the 1990s and is now desperately trying to develop a strategy for survival in the drought-prone 21st century.

The world of wine is so different from and so much bigger than it was in 1971 when my co-author Hugh Johnson launched the first edition of The World Atlas of Wine. The most handsome volume on wine ever to have been published then had a mere 236 pages devoted to the wines of the world (with a total of two on South America). The sixth edition, published on Thursday, groans under the weight of 400.

It has been six years since we launched the last edition, in the eerie atmosphere that prevailed on September 13 2001, when wine seemed so desperately irrelevant and frivolous. Since then, however, the world of wine has increasingly established itself as an important generator and, perhaps even more importantly, indicator of wealth. All over the world now, a wine collection is regarded as a desirable, even expected, accoutrement to financial success, just like membership of the right golf club or investment in significant real estate. New interest from Asia, Russia and, increasingly, Latin America has put extraordinary pressure on prices of the traditional trophy wines, the Bordeaux first growths and most sought-after Grand Cru burgundies. At thousands of dollars a bottle rather than a case nowadays, they can be regarded as part of the luxury goods market, with the additional pressure of investment funds such as the Vintage Wine Fund that have been established to benefit from their status as a trading commodity – hardly a factor in the handbag business.

At the same time, those of us who savour wine’s more democratic appeal have noticed with pleasure how wine has become such a popular leisure interest, especially in the world’s biggest consumer market of all, the United States. At long last, wine in the US seems to have thrown off its damaging associations with hard liquor and beer to emerge as a wholesome, intellectually and socially nourishing pursuit. With the Oscar-winning Sideways, the rather less acclaimed A Good Year and no fewer than two films in production about the France v California Judgment of Paris (or “Paris taste-off”), wine is even big in famously abstemious Hollywood. By 2015, Impact Databank predicts the US will become the world’s biggest consumer of wine, albeit with per capita consumption still lagging far behind that of Britain and, especially, the leading European wine producing countries.

Even in countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, where at the end of the last century wine was still typically taken for granted and mainly drunk, in quantity, by the elderly and impoverished, wine has acquired a new glamour. Wine publications, wine bars and wine clubs all now thrive on mainland Europe, where previously wine was seen as a strictly agricultural product rather than cultural pursuit. In the last academic year the London-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust has taught wine courses to more than 20,000 wine lovers in 39 countries and nine languages. I meet eager WSET students almost wherever I go in the world.

It is hardly surprising, then, that more and more people, often with no background whatsoever in the wine business, want to produce wine. Owning a vineyard or winery has become almost a lifestyle statement. Many who have earned a fortune in a quite different field, where every penny was presumably counted, seem happy to fritter away their fortune on a vanity project that gives them some sort of bibulous connection to the earth, or least a wine label with their name on it. A string of celebrities including Francis Coppola, Gérard Depardieu, Cliff Richard, Sting and Shane Warne have gone into wine production.

Meanwhile, there is still a glut of much more ordinary wine, particularly in Europe: the world is still producing far more wine than it consumes. This, together with the buying muscle of the big retailers worldwide, means that the price of the most basic wine has remained remarkably static over the past 20 years. But while the price gap between the top and bottom of the wine market is wider than it has ever been, the difference in quality between top and bottom is arguably narrower than ever before, thanks to the ever more efficient application of technology to everyday wine production. Today, it is extremely rare to come across a bad wine – even if an army of bottles of boring wine lines many a shelf and there is still an embarrassingly deep lake of surplus wine in the traditional wine-producing countries of Europe. European Union authorities reckon that about 14 per cent of Europe’s wine production – enough to fill 3,300m bottles – is surplus to requirements, and pays to have much of it distilled into alcohol.

The world map of wine regions, however, is hardly recognisable from the 1971 version of the Atlas. In my early days of wine study I had to memorise two neat bands around the globe – one in the temperate zone of each hemisphere, roughly 30 to 50 degrees from the equator – which we all thought then defined the only territory open to the grapevine. How wrong we were.

One of the wine regions to have developed this century is just eight degrees south of the equator, in northern Brazil, in what is, basically, tropical desert where vines would be expected to stand no chance but, thanks to cunningly timed irrigation from the nearby São Francisco river, are tricked into two full growing seasons a year, thereby halving production costs per bottle. This is far from the only example of successful modern tropical viticulture. I can attest that perfectly drinkable wine is now made in Thailand, Vietnam and on the island of Bali. What might be called New Latitude viniculture also now takes place in such unlikely locations as Bolivia, Ecuador, Kenya, Namibia and Sri Lanka.

Not only have vineyards crept much closer to the equator, the extent of viticulture has moved polewards – arguably one of the more benign effects of climate change. Indeed, barely a year passes without the British media speculating about how global warming will force producers in the Champagne region in north-east France to invest in the similarly chalky downs of southern England. While Sussex Sparkling is a fair way from supplanting champagne, its quality, and even that of England’s still wines, has increased noticeably over recent years as grapes reach much higher natural ripeness levels than they used to.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more marked than in Germany, which is experiencing unparalleled demand for its Rieslings, especially from the US, now that this nervy wine can be relied upon to have enough genuine fruit ripeness of its own, without having to rely on sweetness to make it palatable. It helps, of course, that there is a new generation of ambitious German winemakers such as the new stars of Rheinhessen Keller and Wittmann whose produce bears no relation whatever to the mass-market sugarwater that used to make up such a high proportion of Germany’s wine exports.

Global warming has also added new countries to the northern limits of viticulture – even if their vineyards are still far too small to merit a map of their own in The World Atlas of Wine. Vine growers in Belgium, Holland, Denmark and even Poland are now much more confident than they would have been even 10 years ago of producing wine every year, and Luxembourg’s well-established wine industry no longer has to depend so heavily on grape varieties chosen specifically to ripen in a hurry.

Similarly, Canada’s two principal and very different wine-producing provinces, Ontario in the east and British Columbia in the west, at the northern limit of vine cultivation in the Americas, have been experiencing some very unusual vintages. In the past, Canada’s ice wine, made from frozen grapes, was its pride and joy but today sub-zero temperatures tend to arrive very much later than they used to. On the other hand, thanks to global warming, Canadians can now be proud of some of their red wines. (And in my experience, no one is prouder of their own wines than are the Canadians.)

If there was one constant theme that ran through the work that my assistant Julia Harding and I put into this revision over the past two or three years, it was the effect of climate change – for better or worse – virtually everywhere. Water and sunlight are the two essential ingredients in grape-growing, and, while there has been no shortage of the latter – indeed some vignerons are having rapidly to re-think their vine training systems so as to keep the grapes shaded from the sun where it is most merciless – water is becoming the single most important issue for a significant proportion of wine producers worldwide.

Australia’s daring and almost incredibly successful plan to become the world’s most energetic wine exporter was predicated on her ability to produce vast quantities of inexpensive, virtually machine-made wine in the heavily-irrigated Murray Darling basin. Hundreds of growers were told last month that there was only six weeks’ supply of the crucial irrigation water left. Although some government help is promised, in prospect is hardship on a scale unknown among their counterparts in southern France and Italy, who have for decades been systematically cushioned from economic and market reality by generous EU subsidies. Wine Australia’s long-term plan is being revised – towards greater reliance on cooler, wetter parts of the country. Green, brisk Tasmania and grey Victoria suddenly seem a lot more appealing to the vineyard investors so courted by the Australian government in the 1990s.

After such an extraordinary performance, the Australian wine industry seems to be being punished particularly severely by nature. Some climatologists predict that South Africa, which has been producing wine for well over 300 years, will remain relatively unaffected by climate change. And it is also thought by some that the coastal wine regions of California, traditionally cooled by Pacific influence pulled in by the heat of the San Joaquin Valley in the interior, may actually become cooler and damper as temperatures rise inland.

Within Europe, Spain has been the most obvious 21st-century beneficiary of the impact of New World wines on wine drinkers everywhere. As more consumers came to accept the full-bodied, warm climate ferments from the likes of Australia, California and South America as the norm, French wines from cooler climes started to look a little thin. The more robust wines made in Spain, now that the country has an army of wine connoisseurs of her own, have benefited. Spain, in fact, has been sprouting official wine regions so fast and so widely that it is the country that presents a wine atlas author with the greatest challenge in keeping up to date.

But warm climate wines have warm climate problems. Being the European country most at risk from drought is likely to have a shrinking effect on the amount of wine produced in Spain, and very possibly a tasteable effect on the quality of that made in the worst-affected regions.

The 2003 vintage showed how. The severity of the 2003 heatwave stunned Europe’s wine producers, delivering a small crop of often shrivelled, sometimes heat-damaged grapes with thick skins and a high level of often dry-tasting tannins in the wine. In 2003, the truly successful, crème de la crème of European wine was made in pitifully small quantity. Breaking all records, summer 2003 had vignerons hiring refrigerated trucks, carting their beds into their cellars to escape the hot, troubled nights and seeking advice on how to handle these strange conditions from winemakers well outside Europe. It seems unlikely that 2003 will prove a one-off and already some of southern Germany’s growers have installed irrigation systems on some of their faster-draining soils.

At the same time as the great majority of winemakers outside Europe who depend on irrigation anxiously watch the water levels in their bore-holes, dams and lakes fall, many grape growers in Europe have been coping with exceptionally heavy rainfall at unaccustomed times. As if in retribution for the 2005 vintage, in which everything went absolutely right in so much of Europe, both the 2006 and 2007 vintages have severely tested vignerons with their sporadic and often heavy rain and resulting vine maladies and rotten grapes. To survive in today’s competitive wine market vignerons have had to learn to discard any substandard grapes to make the best wine possible. It is, above all, this spirit of ambition and competition that characterises the world of wine today.

More and more producers from a wider array of countries than anyone would have thought possible 30 years ago now clamour for attention. And as temperatures rise, newer, cooler wine regions such as those on the Pacific coast of the Americas and ever higher up mountain slopes emerge. The seventh edition of the Atlas will doubtless need just as vigorous a revision as the sixth.

Fine wines from unexpected sources

Belgium Clos d’Opleeuw Chardonnay 2001 Haspengouw.

A wine that I and another Master of Wine took for a particularly fine Puligny-Montrachet when it was served to us blind this year. It ripens this far from the equator thanks to the vines’ position in a walled vineyard – a ploy used by medieval vine growers.

Georgia Orovela Saperavi 2004 Kakheti.

The most exciting post-Soviet wine to emerge from a country widely regarded as the cradle of viticulture. It is the brainchild of a Georgian who used to work for Pernod Ricard’s optimistic Georgian wine venture and was made by a young Georgian with experience of making wine in both Australia and the Languedoc. There is still huge under-realised potential throughout eastern Europe.

China Grace, Chairman’s Reserve Merlot/Cabernet 2004.

The finest wine so far made in the country that is already the world’s sixth most important grower of grapevines even though eastern China tends to be a bit too damp and western China a bit too cold for viticulture. This one comes from the middle, south of Beijing.

India Grover Vineyards, La Reserve Cabernet/Merlot Bangalore.

No specific vintage for this dependable attempt at copying red bordeaux in the Nandi hills. Michel Rolland, the ubiquitous Pomerol oenologist, consults and LVMH has invested in this producer, through Veuve Clicquot. Sula is the finest producer of Indian whites.

Brazil Rio Sol Cabernet/Shiraz 2006 Valle de São Francisco.

The label features the latitude heavily. Just eight, it is worthy of note. This tropical valley is home to several vineyard projects, closer to the equator than anywhere else on the wine map, thanks to carefully timed irrigation. Two harvests a year keep the retail price below a fiver. You can actually taste the Shiraz.

Canada Le Clos Jordanne, Le Clos Jordanne Vineyard Pinot Noir 2004 Niagara Peninsula.

A joint venture between Boisset of Burgundy and Canada’s dominant wine company Vincor, now part of Constellation, the world’s largest wine company. Very respectable, and fully ripe, answer to red burgundy.

New Mexico Gruet Brut NV New Mexico.

Miraculously good value fizz from the desert south of Albuquerque (nearest town: Truth or Consequences). Again, irrigation from a worryingly shrinking dam many miles away, plus an altitude of 4,300ft, make this possible. Made by refugees from Champagne.

The World Atlas of Wine 6th Edition by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson is published by Mitchell Beazley. Readers of the FT can purchase the book at a special price of £28 including post and packing (rrp £35). To order please call 01903 828503 and quote the code MB128.