Wine taste funny? It may contain cat litter... Malcolm Gluck reveals the unpalatable truth about the wine industry

(DailyMail) - Just whisper the word 'wine' and most of us will start dreaming about a glass of full-bodied red or a chilled, crisp white.

In goes the corkscrew, and out, slowly, comes the cork with a deeply satisfying 'pop'.

Well, stop dreaming right now.

We'll come to the details of why you've already made your first mistake by choosing a bottle sealed with a cork in a moment.

First, I have to tell you some broader home truths about the world of wine.

Because it's not the world of refined elegance and gentle self-indulgence that you probably imagine.

Instead, it's populated by liars, scroungers and cheats, administered by charlatans and snake-oil salesman and run on a system of misrepresentation and ritualised fraud.

It's a world that still deliberately surrounds itself in impenetrable, pretentious and often plain misleading wine-speak, churned out by snobby writers and duplicitous merchants who delight in the obscure and the shadowy, the indistinct and the imprecise.

Often the relationship between producer and supposedly impartial writer turns out to be so close they could accurately be described as twin cheeks of the same backside.

And yet it is from these often self-serving writers that we are supposed to take our wine-buying advice.

In pursuit of metaphors ever more elaborate, one particularly pretentious critic once described a bottle of Palo Cortado as a 'strange hermaphrodite sherry', a description so bizarre that any reader would be left utterly baffled instead of enlightened  -  and certainly not encouraged to try this genuinely delicious sherry.

At least when I once described a wine as 'reminiscent of a sumo-wrestler's jockstrap', you got a pretty good idea that it probably wasn't worth buying.

Wine drinkers have been cowed into believing that wine is a subject so complex that you must pass an advanced course just to dip your toe into it.

They are being duped by an unholy alliance of producers, merchants, restaurateurs and wine writers who have thrown a veil of quasi-religious mystique over wine, that enables them to transform a pleasant drink into an almost holy rite  -  and to charge a small fortune for the pleasure.