In the first century AD the Roman satirist Petronius described a banquet given by a man called Trimalchio. The occasion was lavish, for Trimalchio was very rich. But being a former slave, he was also rather ignorant. At the climax of the evening Trimalchio proudly served his guests a wine labelled “Falernian Opimian, One Hundred Years Old.” Falernum, in what is now southern Lazio, produced the greatest wine of ancient Italy. The Falernian made during the consulship of Opimius was prized highest of all. But there was a small snag. Opimius’s consulship did not fall one hundred years before Trimalchio’s banquet but one hundred and eighty years. Poor Trimalchio had been duped.

Twenty centuries years later, the most prized Italian wine is no longer Falernian but a Tuscan red called Sassicaia. A recent bottle will cost you around $200, or £120. Only a few years ago the Italian police seized 20,000 bottles of counterfeit Sassicaia – a lot, when you consider than only 150,000 bottles of the real thing are made each year. We can only speculate as to how many fake Sassicaias have not been seized, and how many latter-day Trimalchios are savouring them as I write.

Of course, wine fraud can consist of much more than mislabelling. In the 1980s the Austrian wine industry was almost wiped out after it was discovered that producers had been sweetening their wines with anti-freeze. As I noted in an earlier post, the scandal forced the industry to improve its winemaking, and so was ultimately beneficial for everyone – except those killed by the anti-freeze, of course.

Another favourite trick is the bogus award. European wine labels used to be covered in medallions assuring us that the wine in question had won the silver at the 1876 Barcelona Exhibition or the 1932 Grenoble Expo, or some similar event. Many of these awards were genuine, if not especially significant, but some were completely made up. I suppose it was easier to get away with such deception before the age of instant electronic fact-checking; winemakers must now be more careful about the claims they make.

Yet fake awards have not disappeared entirely. As I reported last year, the Wine Spectator magazine (a publication that preys ruthlessly upon modern Trimalchios) was caught out in such a scam, claiming to bestow “awards of excellence” on restaurants with prestigious wine lists. In fact the awards are worthless certificates given to anybody willing to pay the Wine Spectator $250. The fraud was exposed by a blogger who obtained one of these “awards” on behalf of a restaurant that did not exist. Not only that, but his wine list included labels the Wine Spectator itself had panned. It was a shameful episode, but it seems to have changed nothing. Only the other day I noticed an advertisement for a New York restaurant boasting of its “award-winning” wine list. You can guess which award they were referring to.

There is also a form of malpractice that is not strictly fraud, but comes more into the category of creative marketing. After World War Two the makers of Beaujolais found it increasingly difficult to sell their deeply unimpressive product. Their solution was the Beaujolais Nouveau strategy, by which they persuaded consumers that it was chic to drink Beaujolais as early as possible (preferably chilled, to avoid dwelling upon the flavour) and that everyone should vie to be the first to get hold of it. “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est Arrivé” was the marketing slogan, and over the years large numbers of Anglo-Saxon Trimalchios have been happily taken in by it. Interestingly, the French have proved less gullible.

Something similar occurred with this week’s wine. Humagne Blanche is one of Switzerland’s nobler grape varietals, which makes for well-regarded white wines. Humagne Rouge has no connection with it. Indeed, there is really no such thing as Humagne Rouge. Apparently some winemaker in the Valais was having difficulty interesting anyone in his reds, so he renamed the somewhat rustic grape from which they were made “Humagne Rouge” in the hope that this would gain more attention. The trick worked. Humagne Rouge has become an established Swiss wine, with most drinkers assuming that the two Humagnes are somehow akin.

Oddly enough, this particular example of Humagne Rouge (by the aptly named firm of Bonvin) isn’t at all bad. I would never write a post about a Beaujolais Nouveau, much less recommend one, but if you ever come across a bottle of Humagne Rouge I suggest you give it a try. It is a sinewy, aggresively tannic wine with a spicy nose and flavours of earth and coffee. Apparently it is the ideal accompaniment to venison; it certainly went well enough with a very rare steak, though it needed a couple of hours’ airing first. An unusual wine, and well worth $18 or £10 of your money, or mine, or Trimalchio’s.

My understanding is this: a wine is complex when it possesses not one flavour but many. The more complex a wine is, the greater the range of tastes or “notes” you will perceive as it rolls about your mouth. The humblest wines offer only one or two notes, while the greatest are positively symphonic.

If I have this wrong, I would be happy to hear an alternative definition. My doubts in the matter arose when I read the producer’s tasting notes for this week’s wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. The notes talk proudly about the wine’s complexity, as if this were obvious to all who taste it.

To be sure, any wine in this price bracket ought to be complex. Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars recommend that Artemis retail for around $55, or £37. I paid a little over $40 (£27), but the point holds. Once you charge more than $30 for a Cabernet Sauvignon, you have entered the heavyweight division. You are competing with Bordeaux of undoubted pedigree and complexity, serious stuff from the likes of André Lurton.

But I did not find Artemis the least bit complex. It was likeable and elegantly proportioned, with a dominant flavour of blackcurrant and perhaps a suggestion of stewed prunes. But this flavour altered very little as I worked my way down the bottle. I even paused for an hour, to see if the wine might open out a little more, but it did no such thing. My  last sip was disappointingly similar to my first. In other words, this wine was not a heavyweight but a middleweight, a decent enough drop per se, but hardly worth its price tag.

So, why do Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars think $55 fair? Well, Stag’s Leap is one of the most historically important wineries in the US. It was one of this firm’s Cabernets that won the 1976 Paris wine tasting, the event that changed winemaking forever. To any wine lover who is not French (and probably quite a few who are) the firm’s owner, Warren Winiarski, is a modern hero.

I am also well disposed towards Mr Winiarski because over the years he has been one of the few Californian winemakers who have resisted the general trend towards ever more concentrated, muscle-bound wines. (It is no coincidence, one feels, that California’s governor is a former body-builder.) Independence of mind should always be encouraged, especially in a nation where it tends to be frowned upon.

So Artemis is doubly disappointing in coming from such a distinguished source. One can only suppose that it costs as much as it does because of its maker’s reputation. Mr Winiarski is certainly very jealous of his good name. Over the years he has fought a fierce and inconclusive legal battle with the rival Stags Leap Winery, on the grounds that many buyers (the Merry Drinker included) have bought that firm’s wines under the impression that they were Mr Winiarski’s, and that he, Mr Winiarski, should be the sole user of the title “Stag’s Leap”. (It so happens that the rival outfit also makes very good wines, but I had better not get into that here.)

All the same, I do not think Mr Winiarski is doing his reputation any good whatever by putting out such a two-dimensional wine for this sort of money. If you think I am being unreasonable, go out and buy a bottle of Alter Ego, the second wine of Château Palmer. It costs about the same as Artemis, but it inhabits another world, another solar system, another galaxy.  The word “complex” does not begin to do it justice.

But if we are to believe a story that ran throughout the British media last week, the fault was entirely mine.  Apparently I had opened the bottle on the wrong day of the week.  On another day the same wine would have smelled of tulips and tasted like nectar, or something like that.

At any rate, that is the line being put out by several British wine retailers.   They now ask critics to taste their wines only at times when the calendar decrees they will be at their best.  Not any old calendar, of course, but a special one drawn up for the last 47 years by a German lady called Maria Thun.

Frau Thun categorises days as “fruit”, “flower”, “leaf” or “root”, according to the moon and stars. Apparently fruit and flower are good for tasting, leaf and root bad. The retailers therefore only want their wines sampled on fruit and flower days.

Frau Thun has drawn up her calendar on biodynamic principles, following the precepts laid down by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may recall my post on Zind-Humbrecht wines, which are grown according to these precepts.  As I made clear then, the doctrines strike me as nothing more than ethereal bunkum.  And I am doubly suspicious when I hear wine retailers peddling them.

After all, one can see how this notion of fruit and flower days would be very useful for anyone selling wine.  If you charge a fat price for some wine on the grounds that it is rich, complex and aromatic, and a disgruntled client comes back complaining that actually it tastes like pond water, Frau Thun has armed you with the perfect reply.  “Terribly sorry, but you obviously tasted this wine on a root day, and our description was based on a fruit day tasting.  So no, you can’t have a refund.”

Perhaps I am being cynical.  All the same, I would claim that this week’s wine will taste very good indeed on whatever day you drink it.  Château D’Aiguilhe is from the Côtes de Castillon, an area just east of St-Émilion and south of Fronsac.  It is a robust, chewy wine, offering aromas of brambles and oak and a fine array of blackcurrant flavours.  It needs to breathe a good while before drinking, but will amply reward the wait.  Very good value at $38 (£25).

One of the few exceptions is the Syrah grape. For centuries men have been telling colourful tales about its origins. In one version, the grape originates from Syracuse in Sicily.  Supposedly it was discovered there in the third century A.D. by the armies of the Roman Emperor Probus, then exported to a grateful world, eventually finding its true home in the Rhône valley in France.

According to the most famous myth, Syrah comes from Shiraz in Persia, where great wine was made before the arrival of Islam. You will recall that Omar Khayyám’s idea of a good time consisted of a flask of wine, a book of verse and the ministrations of his girlfriend. Omar’s flask would almost certainly have held Shiraz wine, and it is agreeable to think that this tasted like the great Syrahs of our day: a Côte-Rotie or Hermitage from the Rhône, or a Penfold’s Grange from Australia (where Syrah is known as Shiraz).

Agreeable, but wrong.  For one thing, the wines of Shiraz were white. They were also sweet, probably through fortification.  Those who study these matters are agreed that the wines of Persia had a lot more in common with Sherry or Madeira than with any modern red.

In fact, all the charming speculation was ended in 1998 by the Department or Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis.  Using DNA technology the Department’s unromantic scientists established that Syrah is derived from the grape varietals Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche, both native to the northern Rhône. The grape has no connection with either ancient Sicily or medieval Persia.

We may have lost the romance, but we still have the wine, a powerful, fleshy red that suggests fierce summers and uncompromising people. Handled badly, Syrah can amount to nothing more than brutish gut-rot.  Handled well, it makes for wines of startling nobility and grace.

This week’s example is undoubtedly one of the latter. I have already sung the praises of  the Chilean winemaker Aurelio Montes: his Montes Alpha M is considered one of the finest Chilean reds, his Chardonnays are encrusted with awards, and his Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon is quite simply the best value wine I have ever drunk.  Like Alexander the Great, Señor Montes is constantly sighing for fresh worlds to conquer.  Montes Folly is his most resounding triumph so far in the Syrah campaign.

The wine gets its name from Señor Montes’s choice of vineyard.   Everyone else thought the location and altitude disastrously unsuited to Syrah, and the whole experiment seemed doomed to catastrophe. Needless to say, they were wrong and Señor Montes was right.  The ironically named Folly is the resulting wine.  It is worth spending ten minutes merely savouring its nose, an ever-shifting swirl of cinnamon and coffee, charcoal and cloves. On the palate it is equally kaleidoscopic, one moment suggesting rare beef, the next dates, the next licorice. It costs $50 (£33), which is not cheap, particularly in these difficult times. But if you have the money and the mood for something very special, Montes Folly is definitely one to consider.

The short answer is “everything”.   If the past is another country, the 1970s are another planet.  Spacehoppers.  Jumbo flares. Chopper bicycles.  Kipper ties.  Even at the time it seemed an aesthetic wasteland; now it is beyond comprehension.

The popular wines of that period seem equally baffling, or at any rate many of them do.  Thinking back as dispassionately as I can, I should say they fell into three categories.  First you had the stinkers: Liebfraumilch; “Chianti” in raffia baskets; supermarket carafes from California.  All were indefensible.  Most have long since dribbled down the pissoir of history.

Next came a more sensible category, containing such things as Fitou, mass-market Riojas and the Hungarian “Bull’s Blood”.   These were the best low-budget wines you could get before the Australians arrived.  Most are still around, and they are worth sampling.  But by present standards they lack polish, and they no longer seem good value.

In the third category were some perfectly good wines, whose only fault is that they do not suit today’s palate. One is Riesling, which I discussed recently. Another is Chablis.  This was always thought an upmarket drink. It used to be produced at the better dinner party or public function, as it went with most food and hardly anyone disliked it.

But Chablis is not mightily strong, and unlike other white Burgundies, it seldom benefits from aging in oak. The distinctive Chablis taste is dry, austere and peculiarly mineral: the French call it goût de pierre à fusil, “the taste of gunflint”.  Other people liken the taste to metal; I have even heard it compared to aspirin.

All this is unlikely to find favour at a time when the prevailing taste is for fat, creamy whites heavily flavoured with oak.  Drouhin’s example is not bad: its nose suggests lime and kiwi, its palette grapefruit, white melon and, yes, a hint of aspirin.  I enjoyed it, my wife did not.  I thought it reasonable value for $28 (£19); she thought it excessive. Obviously, there can be no right and wrong in such matters.  But my guess is that sooner or later Chablis will return to public esteem.  I just hope we won’t have to wear jumbo flares and kipper ties while we drink it.

As you would expect, its selection of US wines is rich beyond compare, and its range of South Americans, South Africans and Australasians is almost as wide. The choice of Italian wines is less spectacular, but still good. And the selection of Bordeaux is simply magnificent, everything from $16 bargains to $5000 eye-poppers.

So I feel rather churlish grumbling about this firm’s red Burgundies, but grumble I must. It is not just that the choice is comparatively meagre, but that the wines themselves are frequently poor. Too often this store has charged me $25, $35, even $50 for boring Pommards, indifferent Volnays, and Gevrey-Chambertins that bring about a deep existential gloom.

To be sure, the firm has some really serious Burgundy for those who can afford it: Romanée-Contis for $1000 upwards, that sort of thing.  But this is not the stuff of my everyday drinking or, I suspect, yours. So nowadays, when minded to drink a Pinot Noir, I tend to head for the non-French shelves and ignore the one marked “Burgundy”.  If nothing but a Burgundy will do, I will buy it from a more specialized outlet, where prices are higher but the choice and quality are more to my liking.

I say all this not out of resentment for my local supplier, but because I have noticed the same trend everywhere I have been in the United States. One can guess why.  For one thing, there is simply less Burgundy to go round: 200 million bottles each year, against Bordeaux’s 475 million.  And very many Burgundian winemakers have no scruples at all about selling an indifferent product.  Also, US drinkers seem generally less familiar with the Pinot Noir grape, and will accept a level of quality in a Nuits Saint-George that they would never tolerate in a St Emilion.

This means that we drinkers should do all in our power to encourage the efforts of non-French winemakers to create Burgundy substitutes.  The problem in the case of Pinot Noir is getting the taste right. Much as I enjoy American Pinots, especially those from Oregon, few could be considered replacements for Burgundy.  Most are too full-bodied, their fruit flavours too dominant, their use of wood too heavy-handed.  I have yet to find a single good example from South America, and every Australian version I have tried has been a disappointment.

The greatest hope lies with New Zealand.  It is not simply that the country’s cool, damp climate favours the Pinot Noir grape, but also that the country’s winemakers seem obsessed with replicating the Burgundy style.  I think they are succeeding. Their Pinot Noirs are now light enough, complex enough, and gamey enough to be mistakable for the original.

In fact, the only reason you would know that some of these Pinot Noirs were from New Zealand is because no Burgundian would charge so little for anything this good. This week’s wine costs only $22 (£15), yet it is easily better than one or two $50 Burgundies I have suffered lately. It has a bright, clean nose suggesting freshly sanded wood. Its flavours suggest prunes, berries and cigar boxes, with a pleasing cedary aftertaste.

This wine also has the distinction of having been made by an exclusively Maori firm – the first and only such winery in New Zealand, we are told. Tohu has been in business for a mere 11 years, yet it is already ranked among the country’s top 30 winemakers. It is striving to join the top 10. When it succeeds, its price will no doubt soar, and we shall have to seek our Burgundy alternatives elsewhere. But for the time being, Tohu is one of the best value Pinot Noirs of its kind.

My name on the label is a guarantee of irreproachable quality, recognized around the world.

Immodest?  Moi?  But the maddening thing is, he’s right. Lurton is one of the big names of Bordeaux, and his wines are excellent.

The family’s empire began with François Lurton’s Château Bonnet.  In the 1920s François added the Margaux property Château Brane Cantenac. Then, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his sons André and Lucien bought up many more vineyards, so that André himself now owns eleven châteaux in Bordeaux and his wider family owns properties in Languedoc, Corbieres, Spain, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Family members also consult for two dozen other firms all over the world.

André’s properties are mostly in the Graves region: Château la Louviére, Château  Couhins, Château Rochemorin, and this week’s wine, Château de Cruzeau. By 1980 the Graves region had fallen into decline, and it was André who did more than anyone else to revive its fortunes, introducing modern techniques and refusing to accept the abysmal standards to which much local wine, particularly the whites, had fallen. André also campaigned successfully for the creation of a new appellation within the region, that of Pessac-Léognan.

You might suppose that following such accomplishments André Lurton would be a popular figure.  But this is France, a country whose inhabitants delight in perversity.  Three years ago, independent wine producers targeted Château Bonnet for a symbolic vine-pulling protest.

“Lurton represents the new class of producers who are omnipresent throughout the world and damaging our local industry, making it harder and harder for young winemakers to be successful,” complained one of their organisers.

This oaf’s demands, so far as I can understand them, were that the French government should support incompetent winemakers like himself by putting the Lurtons out of business and subsidising his own undrinkable rubbish.

Once upon a time such demands were usually met.  That is why, from around 1945 to 1995, low-budget French wines were generally awful, and why too many of the upmarket wines were rotten value for money.  The arrival of good, cheap wine from the New World put an end to all that, or so we thought.  But with the global economic crisis we hear growing calls for protectionism.  We must fervently hope such calls will be ignored, for if there is one class of people bound to suffer from trade barriers it is wine lovers like ourselves.

At any rate, all hail André Lurton.  Château de Cruzeau is a good example of what he can offer for around $30 (£24): a dense, full-bodied red with a mocha fragrance and creamy flavours of vanilla and cocoa.  Try his other reds too, and his whites.  (I praised one of the latter a couple of years ago.)  And while you are sampling these good, modern wines, pray that Nicholas Sarkozy’s remark that “Europe needs protection” turns out, like so much else about that absurd little man, to be nothing more than posturing.

My own nominee would be the Phylloxera aphid. This vicious little American pest feeds on the roots of vines and quickly destroys them.  During the 1860s and 70s it ravaged Europe’s vineyards and almost wiped out the entire continent’s production.  The only vines that could resist its attentions were those native to North America.  But American grapes produced an inferior, nasty-smelling drink of no imaginable interest to wine lovers.  What was to be done?

The solution, it turned out, was to graft European vines onto American vinestocks, and that is what Europeans have been doing ever since.  There has been much debate about whether and how this practice has changed the character of wine, but the argument seems academic, as we no longer have any basis for a comparison.

True, one or two examples of nineteenth-century wine still exist, but few of us are likely to sample them, and even if we could, I am not sure how much we might reasonably infer from any wine so old.  As for modern comparisons, the only remaining part of Europe that makes wine from pre-phylloxera vines is, I believe, Cyprus.  Whatever one thinks of Cypriot wine, it can offer few clues as to the taste of an 1845 Pomerol or an 1870 Chambertin.  Those wines are gone, and we have no objective way of measuring our loss.

All the same, the pre-Phylloxera world is not entirely closed off to us. Apart from Cyprus, there are a number of wine-growing areas of the planet which, through latitude or altitude, have always been immune to the killer aphid. One is Chile.

The house of Undurraga was founded in 1885 by Don Francisco Undurraga Vicuna.  It claims to be the only Chilean house still to use pre-phylloxera vines, brought over from Europe by Don Francisco himself.  I am in no position to verify these claims, but am happy to accept them.  The more interesting question is whether the taste of Undurraga’s wines is in any way distinctive through being pre-phylloxera, and on this subject Undurraga is annoyingly silent.

Whatever the reason, it so happens that Undurraga Founder’s Reserve is distinctive, both in its nose (earth, woodsmoke) and its flavour (cinnamon and coffee, among other things).  Its minerality reminded me distantly of Lebanese wine, but I would not press this point.  What matters is that amid the sea of competent but indistinguishable wines in the $29 (£20) bracket, this wine is both enjoyable and memorable.  Whether or not this is due to the presence of a European rather than a North American vinestock, I leave you to decide.  Oh, and do enjoy the parlour game.

Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within the tent.

So the first man to grow wine was also the first flasher. Best not to linger on this unhappy coincidence; of greater interest to me is where Noah is alleged to have carried out his planting, drinking, etc.: the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now eastern Turkey.

The Bible may well have got it right.  According to the experts, Turkey competes with Georgia as the most likely birthplace of wine. The country boasts over a thousand varieties of vine, and it was a vigorous winemaking nation from earliest antiquity until the 10th century AD, when Islam arrived.  Thereafter, Turkey and wine had very little to do with one another.  This grim hiatus lasted about a thousand years, though throughout that time Turkey continued to grow grapes.  (It is still the world’s fourth-largest producer, with most of its crop destined for the fruit basket or for drying into raisins.)

Wine production resumed in the 1920s, in the new secular order brought in by Kemal Atatürk. The first wineries were owned by the state, to be joined later by a number of private producers, one being the firm of Kavaklidere. But with 99% of the Turkish population still Muslim, all this wine must be principally for export. So the vital question is, what do we, the intended market, think of Turkish wine?

Not bad at all, is my verdict. This week’s Yakut is a pleasant, medium-bodied quaffer, smooth and clean on the palate, with a bright, fruity nose. It is lighter than one might expect, but at 13°, by no means flimsy. Indeed, the best compliment one can pay it is to say that it is everything a table wine ought to be.  On the strength of it I am keen to sample the firm’s more upmarket offerings.  $12 in the US, £7 in the UK.

The consensus seems to be that the Vino Nobile lacks the finesse and elegance of its Tuscan cousins, Brunello and Chianti.  Various explanations are offered for this: Montepulciano has less limestone in its soil; its nights are warmer.  In consequence, we are told, the wine is too full and too alcoholic.   Drivel, say I.

The problem, if there is a problem, has more to do with contemporary taste.  According to the regulations which govern the production of Italian wine, Vino Nobile must be made almost entirely from the Sangiovese grape (known in these parts as Prugnolo Gentile) and it must be aged in large barrels, ensuring a fruity rather than an oaky flavor.

However, drinkers nowadays are accustomed to a pronounced flavour of oak in their wine, usually achieved by aging the wine in small barrels known as barriques.  People also have come to regard the flavours of the international grape varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot as “normal”, thanks to their ubiquity.  Other varietals and other methods of production are greeted with suspicion, if not hostility.

In Montepulciano, one or two of the better local producers have got round this problem by blending Sangiovese with a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon, and marketing the resulting wine under a proprietary name.  The firm of Poliziano, perhaps Montepulciano’s finest, produces some truly magnificent wines with labels such as Asinone and Le Stanze.

Another, very Italian, solution is to seek a way round the regulations. The firm of Corte alla Flora has been in business for only a decade. You will find them in few of the reference books, and they are ignored even by Italy’s foremost wine guide, the Gambero Rosso. They are nonetheless a member of the Montepulciano wine consortium,  their wines are labelled DOC, and there is no questioning their legitimacy. Now, according to the own website, their Vino Nobile is aged for 18 months in Allier oak casks. The site does not claim that these casks are barriques, and perhaps they are not, although wine merchants up and down the Internet seem convinced that they are, and are marketing the wine accordingly. My guess is that the rules have somehow been finessed, and that the casks in question, while not strictly barriques, are nonetheless small enough to impart a little extra oak flavour and softness.

Whatever the truth of the matter, this is a very pleasant Vino Nobile, offering good value at only $22 in the US, £12 pounds in the UK.  Its nose suggests earth and mushrooms.  It tastes of cherry and summac, with a hint of aniseed.  It is rather more austere than Chiantis in the same price range, and it is hard to know how to compare it to Brunello di Montalcino, as no Brunello costs so little.  But really, I am not sure there is much to be gained from such comparisons.  Vino Nobile is its own wine and should be judged in its own right.  Certainly, it does not taste like anybody’s poor relation, and in these straitened times, as the need for good value becomes ever more pressing, Vino Nobile’s hour may finally have come.