Organic cultivation comes naturally to those of us, myself included, who have allotments. When all that separates you from your neighbour's plot is a foot-wide grass path, you think twice before spraying your brassicas with anything that might drift over the divide and do mischief to his raspberries.

And anyway, there is a common bond between allotmenteers: rugged self-sufficiency. We're here because we wish to grow our own, in our own way. To misquote Pink Floyd, we don't need no chemistry, we don't need no pest control. Beyond suspending a few superannuated CDs amid the soft fruit to see off the starlings, that is.

I like to imagine this is the motivation behind the production of organic wine. The grape growers don't want to drench their vines in fungicides, herbicides and other lethal substances besides lest they upset the natural balance of their own ground, or next door's. Admirable, I call it, and it must save a fortune in agrichemical bills.

Non-organic grape-growing, it must be said, can be a pretty grim business. Last year, my wife and I wanted to stay at our favourite chambre d'hôte (B&B), a former wine chateau in the Beaujolais region of France, only to discover from the owner, Marty, that he had upped sticks and moved south, out of the wine region, to a new location. We stayed loyal, and booked into the lovely new place (see chateaudevaulx.com) he had taken on amid the lush, green farming landscape of Charolais-Brionnais.

Why had he moved? "I couldn't bear the vineyards," he told us. "The wine producers are always out with noisy machines tilling, pruning and endlessly spraying, and because they kill all the insects there are no birds, no kind of wildlife at all. Besides the tractors, the landscape is silent and barren; it might as well be dead."

I had never heard this kind of complaint about life among the vines before, but I got the drift. Had the vineyards surrounding Marty's fine chatelaine house and garden been organic, he would still have been there, breathing air free from chemical particles and rarely hearing any sound more intrusive than birdsong.

Does it make a case for drinking organic wine? I think so, and at the launch of Organic Fortnight, which this weekend is, there can be no better time to get converted.

As it happens, France leads the way in organic wine production. Even mass-market brands are in on the movement, including leading Bordeaux producer Calvet. I greatly like Calvet Reserve Organic Bordeaux 2007 (Waitrose £8.49) for its silky but gripping black-fruit blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes. It is a modest 50p more than its non-organic counterpart, and worth the outlay.

Perrin Côtes du Rhône Nature 2009 at £8.99 from the Co-op is a hugely likeable red with strong mauve colour, 14.5 per cent alcohol and classic spicy-blackberry fruit, made by a famed Chateauneuf-du-Pape producer.

But the choice of organic wines in supermarkets is limited. If you're keen, consider a specialist merchant. The one I know best is Vintage Roots, a Berkshire-based outfit founded 25 years ago and still going strong, mainly by mail order. They offer several hundred wines (including more than 70 from France), beers, ciders and spirits all organically or "biodynamically" (call it super-organic) made and properly certified as such. See the excellent website at vintageroots.co.uk.

Of the French wines I have tasted recently from Vintage Roots, I commend dry white Bergerac Chateau Richard at £6.65, from which the 2008 was an elegantly refreshing balance between exotic tropical ripeness and zingy citrus tang, and Chateau de Brau Cuvée Exquise 2007 (£8.99), a dark and brooding spicy red of reassuring richness from the appellation of Cabardes in the Languedoc – great with roast meats.

Yapp Bros of Mere in Wiltshire (tel 01747 860423), specialists in wines from France, don't profess any particular organic preferences, but do list an impressive number of wines from estates that do. Among them is Chateau la Canorgue in the Luberon region of Provence. Red Canorgue 2008 costs £12.25 but is correspondingly special with its powerful, velvety, brambly black-fruit flavours, very rewarding to drink now and with ageing potential for the next five years.

My own favourite Rhône red Lirac La Fermade 2007 (£10.25 from Yapp) is made under the terms of "l'agriculture raisonnée" a system very close to organic – you could loosely translate it as sustainable farming – and I like to think that the sublime purity of this satin-textured, wild-fruit, unoaked red owes much to the thoroughly Presbyterian method of its production.

Back on earth, I must concede France does not have a monopoly on organic wine. From Chile, dry white Adobe Chardonnay 2009 at £7.49 from Majestic is deliciously crisp with sweet-apple fruit, very pure in flavour, as might be expected. And from Waitrose, where they do make a bit of a thing about organic wine, one of my wines of the year is Tsantali Organic Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 at £8.49. It's from Halkidiki which, in case you didn't know, is in the northern reaches of Greece, up in the Balkans, and generously delicious with smooth, ripe, pure-blackcurrant flavours of ideal concentration and balance. Textbook Cabernet by any standard.

Are we drinking more than we used to? There is good news, and good news. According to several recent reports from both official and trade sources, Britons today drink less alcohol than we did a century ago, when we were vastly less prosperous than we are now. And wine, as a proportion of what we drink overall, has grown from one fiftieth to nearly a third.

Back in 1910, and throughout the first half of the 20th century, we got through no more than two bottles of wine per head, per year. Today, it's about 28 bottles – a little over half a bottle per week. Beer consumption has gone through the floor. It halved between 1900 and 2000, and in the last decade alone has fallen by another quarter. Spirits are at exactly the same level now as in 1910 and the good news for the West's cider industry is that UK consumption has grown eightfold – yes, eight times – since 1950. It's still a pretty modest amount, about five pints per person per year, but we are certainly going in the right direction.

How do we compare with our European neighbours? In wine terms, it's fascinating. While our consumption has been rising (although it's fallen back ten per cent in the last five years), wine drinking in France has plummeted by two thirds just since 1980. In Italy, wine has halved from 120 to 60 bottles in the same period and in the meantime beer consumption has doubled. In Spain since 1980 wine has sunk from 90 bottles per year to 40 today.

Britain comes nowhere for overall alcohol consumption compared to most of our European Union neighbours, but we do have the distinction of paying the highest excise duties on drink of any EU member country. The highest retail prices for alcoholic drinks, however, are charged not in Britain but in Denmark. Oddly enough, it is also Denmark that tops the list for overall alcohol consumption. Policymakers who believe in reducing demand for drink by inflating its price might wish to take note of the Danish experience.

Bonterra Chardonnay 2007, reduced by a third from £10.99 to £7.29 at Waitrose until 21 September, is a luxury organic wine from California. From dreamy vineyards in the state's Mendocino County (the main picture on this page today), the northernmost vine-growing region of California, this is one of several excellent wines made by America's largest organic producer, Fetzer, an enterprise founded in 1968 and lately taken over by the huge US distilling group Brown Forman. Bonterra Chardonnay is a consistently lush, ripe oak-matured wine of real character.