Enter the fun, friendly world of the new wine shop These are shops with strong roots into the local community - who run offbeat events (wine and book club, anyone?) with a sense of humour. Bottle Apostle, for example, has pleasingly subverted that annoying don't drink if you're pregnant road-sign-styled logo to advertise its "Mums of Victoria Park" afternoon tastings. It goes beyond Hackney - even beyond London (though London is particularly rich in new places). There's The Sampler in Islington and South Kensington, Vagabond in Fulham, Prohibition in Muswell Hill and D Vine Cellars in Clapham. Further afield, there's Vino Vero in Leigh-on-Sea, Scarlet Wines in Hale, near St Ives, hangingditch of Manchester - and more. I see the trend also as part of a bigger groundswell that's taking the red trousers (and all they represent) out of wine - and, often replacing them with check shirts and little beards. Is wine - finally - becoming hip? "No beard here," says Colin Thorne when I drop into Vagabond. Half-hipster. Well, we are in Fulham. He does, though, have not just the check shirt but also the twitter handle @vinovelovinyl. One of the trends I notice in the new wave is that of blokes who love music getting into wine in the same way. In the magazine Noble Rot, for example, set up by A & R man Dan Keeling and wine buyer Mark Andrew, which describes itself as being "alternative" and "about wine, with a healthy dose of music and food." Among non-music geeks, too, there is an increasing willingness to devote time and energy to hunting out niche artisan bottles in the same way that people track down vinyl. These are wines that "still get little or no bandwidth in most retail channels," as D Vine Cellars say in their shop manifesto. But, note, we're not talking about first growths here. "It's not about Bordeaux," says Thorne, and there is quite an edge to the way he says "Bordeaux." We're just feeling our way around what's exciting, we're buying a lot from the south of Italy - and Montecucco in Tuscany has some beautiful stuff. If you sense an air of revolutionary talk, then you'd be right. The new wine guard is self-consciously anti-snob. There's also a very blokey vibe veined through a lot of the wine and music chat - though happily that's not all there is to it. Today's wine world is more egalitarian. It's not about forking out hundreds or thousands of pounds for a single case to go down in the cellar, but exploring the byways and highways to see what you can find in the £10-£20 range. New winos are not thick third sons pushed into the trade through parental despair. They have chosen it. Often, like Paola Tich, they bring a wealth of experience from elsewhere. She was a reporter for GMTV and presenter for Capital Radio, worked in corporate communications, including a stint at Barclays at the height of the banking crisis, and later set up her own business. Now she's converting supermarket white zinfandel drinkers to off-dry riesling, doing emergency home deliveries of delicious wine for tied-down mothers whose husbands have just announced a load of friends are about to arrive for dinner, and quietly persuading the lucky people who live in Acton that £12 for a bottle of wine is worth it - if the act of buying and drinking it is an experience, not just a bland way of ingesting alcoholic fuel. I'll drink a glass of cerasuolo di vittoria to that.