It's a sad truth, but there is a lot of fake wine out there

The news of E&J Gallo, the world's biggest single wine producer, being hoodwinked by a group of errant French vignerons is funny and depressing at the same time.

It isn't, however, surprising. The comedy comes from Gallo's clumsy attempt to ride the post-Sideways pinot noir craze by peddling Red Bicyclette as an authentic French pinot when it turned out to be anything but.

It doesn't say much for Gallo's professionalism that its buyers couldn't tell the different between pinot, merlot and shiraz.

It is a sad truth, however, that there is a lot of fake wine out there. We're not talking here about bottles of first growth Bordeaux that may or may not have belonged to Thomas Jefferson (wines auctioned as such for over $100,000 are currently the subject of court cases in the US). While sophisticated counterfeit bottles are a growing cause for concern at the top end of the market, wine fakery is just as common lower down the chain.

Italy is the prime exponent – to such an extent that, in 2007, 25 police officers qualified as sommeliers in order to combat the problem. For years a blind eye was turned to the containers of gutsy wine from the south making its way to the more rarefied north – Tuscany, Piedmont and Verona.

I've never heard a convincing explanation of why bulk wine would be transported to regions that are disqualified from using it in their wines, but an answer may lie in more recent alleged scams. The wine of the much-lauded DOC Brunello di Montalcino has to be made exclusively from sangiovese in order to quality for the name. But sangiovese is a fragile, difficult grape, with a tendency to produce thin wine in poor vintages. Nothing that a little splash of muscular cabernet sauvignon can't mask, though – a particularly tempting option for those exporting to the US, which favours more punchy wines.

In France, the "King of Beaujolais", Georges Duboeuf, was fined €30,000 in 2006 for illegally blending lesser, generic wines into his higher quality cru cuvées. And in Bordeaux, the co-owner of classed growth Château Giscours was investigated for allegedly blending generic wine from the broader Haut Medoc appellation into the property's second wine in 1995.

One can argue all day as to whether a wine has to meet certain criteria to qualify as a good wine. If Gallo's Red Bicyclette tastes good, are consumers bothered if it's merlot not pinot? Higher up the scale, though, provenance and typicity are highly valued by wine lovers. Ultimately, though, nothing will ever compare to the taste of the Bolivian "wine" discovered by customs officials in Bulgaria last year. The content of the bottles? Liquid cocaine.