Although the great majority of us still want to enjoy lazing on sunny beaches, activity holidays have become more fashionable. Wine tourism is one of the most popular, writes Jochen Erler For wine-lovers there is a wide choice of tours available. Travel agencies and specialised operators offer wine tours which normally involve visits to wineries and tutored wine-tastings.

Travel can be by coach, riverboat, bicycle, walking or a combination of means, either in groups or individually. But you can easily plan your own trip.

The Touring in Wine Country series, published by Mitchell Beazley, will serve the more independently-minded traveller well, and you will find addresses of wine farms which offer B&B accomodation on the Internet.

Travelling in your own car also has the advantage that you can easily transport cases of wine home, and you can organise ferry crossings with companies such as P&O, which offers routes to Bilbao, or Britanny Ferries which sails to Santander serving destinations in Spain and Portugal.

However, if you wish to avoid long-distance driving to destinations such as Hungary or Italy, air travel is preferable with on-site car rental, especially if cheap flights are available.

Beautiful Tuscany is one of the attractive wine-growing areas that can be reached by low-cost airline travel. It has its own Mitchell Beazley volume to guide you and offers attractive accommodation sometimes linked to wineries.

RyanAir flies to Florence and EasyJet to nearby Pisa. The wineries producing Tuscany's Sangiovese wines with famous appellations like Chianti, Montepulciano and Montalcino (Brunello), as well as the sweet passito and vino santo wines, are all in easy reach from either of these two tourist cities.

Not far to the south, near the western coast of Italy, are the areas of Borghia and neighbouring Val di Cornia. They benefit from the warmest and driest weather in Tuscany.

Both areas have become Tuscany's exclusively from international' grape varieties that are not permitted under DOC regulations.

Soon other local producers followed, and investors from abroad made big investments.

On land adjacent to Sassicaia, the international venture Ornellaia was created jointly by Gallo of California and Frescobaldi of Italy.

The success of Sassicaia's and Ornellaia's predominantly Bordeaux-type wines, called Supertuscans', prompted the Italian authorities to modify some of their DOC (appellation) regulations. However, the Supertuscans' are still outside the DOC and belong to the Indicazione Geografica Tipica' (IGT) category.

Today, most producers in Borghia and Val di Cornia, with the exception of the old generation of wine farmers who stick to their traditional Sangiovese, make IGT wines from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Syrah.

All these international varieties thrive on the soil and in the microclimate (hot days, cool nights) of this coastal area of Italy. Some of these wines are sold at very high prices.

The newly-built wineries of Tuscany which this author has seen so far are showcases of beautiful architecture and modern wine-making technology.

They use gravity from the crusher to the bottling line so that the pumping of grapes or wine is eliminated.

Petra's winery near Sovereto (pictured below), designed by Mario Botta, a famous Italian architect who uses cylindrical shapes for his buildings, is perhaps the most outstanding example for modern architecture in the Italian wine industry.

The farmers in Borghia and Val di Cornia are not only innovative wine-growers, but also great promoters of agro-tourism. Here you can find the greatest number of wine farms offering B&B in Italy.

One of them is the Azienda Agricola Bulichella, a certified organic farm making wine, olive oil, jams and other food products from its own produce. It is located some 60km south of Pisa in the Val di Cornia, within easy reach of a quiet beach, beautiful medieval towns and Etruscian archaeological sites, as well as the thermal baths.

From nearby Pombino you can take the ferry for an excursion to the famous island of Elba to try wines which Napoleon might have tasted during his stay there.

The indigenous Aleatico grape is grown for a passito-type red, a sweet wine produced by drying the grapes on mats before pressing them.

This same wine is also produced on the coastal mainland along with a white passito-type wine, attractively amber coloured, made from the Ansonica grape.

Like the many agro-turisme' farms in the Western part of Tuscany, the Bulichella farm offers various types of accommodation.

There is one single bedroom and several apartments with three beds. The apartments and one villa (sleeping five) have fully equipped kitchens.

Bulichella's 100 per cent Sangiovese is one of the best wines of Tuscany at a price of 24 Euros. Their basic red wine at ten euros also a DOC, is a blend of 60 per cent Sangiovese with 40 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon.

It was among the two best in a comparative tasting of 12 basic red wines of the Val di Cornia.

Bulichella has also a more costly powerful Bordeaux-style Supertuscan, and a modest dry white wine made from the Ansonica grape.

Wine tourism, anyway you engage in it, either with an organised group or exploring on your own, provides a deeper understanding of the wines and how they are made. It also enables you to make more informed choices when purchasing wine after you get back home.

Fact file Winetrails is a UK-based specialised walking (and cycling) tour operator in nine European countries as well as Chile, South Africa and Australia).

Call 01306 712 111, or visit the website: www.winetrails.co.uk A UK-based website (subscription required) for French destinations is www. winetravelguides.com Italian wine farms offering B&B can be found on the Internet by searching for agro-turisme'.