The country of Turkey, then known as Anatolia, began producing wine six thousand years ago. There are exhibits of this early wine industry dating back to 4,000 B.C. in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The ancient word for wine by this pre-Hittite civilization was actually Vino. Today, Turkish wines fly under the radar of most people and most wine lovers.

Visit DanAykroydWines.com Whether you know him from Saturday Night Live , the Blues Brothers , Ghostbusters or the myriad films in which he has appeared, Dan Aykroyd’s DNA is found throughout the blueprint of pop culture. Now, three decades after exploding onto the scene as an SNL cast member, he has turned his attention to winemaking with the launch of Dan Aykroyd Wines . IntoWine recently caught up with Dan to learn more about his wine venture. What first got you into wine? I really got interested in wine when I started working on Saturday Night Live. Up to that point my level of sophistication was mostly drinking Mateus Rose to impress various young ladies on dates or back at their place, if I was lucky. However Steve Cropper the legendary blues musician who played in the Blues Brothers band and on the show took me under his wing and taught me a lot about wine. He was the one who introduced me to Grand Cru Bordeaux and Burgundy and the wonderful big reds of California. While he’s the one who got me started it was really my friend Issac Tigrett who was one of the founders of the House of Blues who gave me my graduate course in fine wine.

It may seem impossible, but there are, as yet, vast, undiscovered areas where wines are produced that few people seem to know about. More specifically, there are few wineries that excel at a level of winemaking which belies the inherent strength of the specific region. Case in point: Mission Hill Winery in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada.

IntoWine.com asked a panel of wine experts for their recommendation for the best New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc: New Zealand took the wine world by storm with its intensely flavored Sauvignon Blancs starting in the 1980s. Sauv Blanc is still the most widely planted grape in Kiwi Country, by a long shot, and there are numerous great examples. My favorite NZ Sauv Blanc from recent vintages is the 2012 Loveblock, the first vintage from Kim and Erica Crawford’s new label. They were the team behind the hugely successful Kim Crawford label, which they sold to Vincor International in 2003 for $8.6 million. The Loveblock is a complex, structured Sauvignon Blanc, with notes of ripe lime, smoke and sweet green chili. You can find it for an average of $18 at U.S. retailers. Another favorite producer is the justly famous Cloudy Bay, which makes both a delicious, balanced, unoaked version, as well as a Sauv Blanc that is reminiscent of a white Bordeaux from a ripe year—the Te Koko, which spends 18 months in French oak. One more great one is the intensely flavored Saint Clair Family Estate Selection. Richard Jennings, IntoWine.com Featured Contributor and the Founder RJonWine.com.

Virginia is well known for its revolutionary and Civil War history. One of the original 13 colonies, it’s practically the birthplace of the U.S. It’s less known however for the 150 wineries which dot the landscape, turning out respectable wines since the days of the founding fathers.

Wines from the Rhone Valley in France can be great values especially those wines labeled Cotes du Rhone. Cotes du Rhone is an AOC wine whose territory extends over the Rhone Valley from Vienne in the north to Avignon in the south. Cote means hillside and Rhone is the famous river that runs thru southeastern France. The AOC spans across areas in both the northern and southern Rhone Valleys. Cotes du Rhone is often referred to as a generic appellation because it is the lowest level of AOC wines and covers such a large area. All though not the subject of this article, the AOC Cotes du Rhone Villages allows for “better” wines coming from one of the allowed villages. These will be explored in a future article.

It’s almost a cliché – the image of the winemaker sitting in some kind of laboratory perfecting the blend for a final wine. In truth, it’s much more hands on. Wine is made in the cellar, after all, using tried and true methods and careful handling. For the commercial winery, the selections of barrels for blending can be very arbitrary – a final quantity taking precedence over a final quality. The micro-winery has a much greater incentive to strive for quality, having limited resources from which to create a final blend.

Barossa Valley is the best-known and, arguably, most important wine region in Australia. Any discussion of top Australian wineries or innovative winemakers will inevitably include some of the top names from Barossa Valley. The region is blessed with a wide variety of soils and a long history of family winemaking. At some Barossa Valley wineries, you can go back five or six generations to the area's original German-speaking settlers, ancestors of today's growers and winemakers. Barossa Valley's unique heritage is reflected in its top-quality wines, which come not only from large, long-established wineries but also from a new generation of boutique winemakers.

German Rieslings are, to put it bluntly, misunderstood wines. German winemakers will tell you that Riesling is their country's flagship wine and that the Riesling grape works perfectly with the cooler climates and slaty soils of German river valleys. If, however, you ask a group of non-German wine drinkers to tell you about Riesling, several of them will probably use phrases like "too sweet" and "doesn't pair well" in their descriptions. In my opinion, they are missing out on one of the world's great wines.

When one thinks of dry wines from Italy’s Piemonte, they are usually red wines. There is a white wine though that should be on everyone’s radar. I am speaking about Arneis. It is the perfect white for transitioning from summer to autumn. Arneis is both the name of a wine and the grape from which it is made. The name means “little rascal” in Piemontese dialect, so named because it can be difficult to grow. Historically that difficulty was because the better situated vineyards were planted with the “more important” red nebbiolo grape leaving the “lesser” sites for Arneis.