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Four European colonial powers were instrumental in the formation of wine industries in the so-called New World: in the Americas it was the Spanish; down under it was the British; and in South Africa it was the Dutch.

In the 15th century the Spanish were preoccupied with the many natural resource riches of the Americas but the grapevine was not one of them. Spanish conquerers brought their own wine and then planted winegrapes primarily to serve wine to Spanish settlers, and for the church. It was not until well into the nineteenth century that the wines of the West and Southwest of the U.S. began to be sealed with an American stamp. At about the same time easterners became successful with commercial wine after over 100 years of failure in the vineyard.

Australia was a colony of Britain's that was formed mainly by ex-prisoners and sociopaths expelled from the mother country; but they were British, and England had been (and still is) among the most wine thirsty of nations. It was inevitable that the many hospitable soils of Australia (and later New Zealand) would one day produce premium table wines.

The South African coast is home to one of the most fruitful wine regions of the world and it began in the mid nineteenth century when Dutch merchants sought ways to provide good, reasonably-priced wines to their European consumers. But it was not until the ever oppressed itinerant Huguenots arrived some twenty years after the country's colonial establishment that truly good wines began to come from the Cape region.

New World technology and marketing concepts have affected the whole world of commercial wine. In no time throughout history has there been wines of more consistent quality then are available on the world stage today. In Old World marketing regional identity was of supreme importance; it gave rise to wine identification by place and by producer. That system still is important but it slowly bows to a system that relies on grape varietal labeling, a system that is particularly New World (with the exception of Germany and Alsace). Britain has historically been a strong European market for wine, and still is, but today the United States is the Holy Grail of potential wine consumption; as such, it has grabbed the attention of every wine-producing nation. While Australians, New Zealanders, and just about every other Old or New World wine country consumes greater quantities of wine per-capita than the United States, there are so many untapped consumers with so much money that a market that does not yet exist in the U.S. manages to draw wine to it from the world over like a giant magnet. Meanwhile, the California wine industry collectively ignores the untapped home market, preferring instead to produce a greater and greater supply of highly priced wines more suited to the auction block than the dinner table. And so the Old World (and a part of the developing New World) has stepped up its effort to send the U.S. great wines at greater-than-ever price value.