There's something very sexy about being able to swing into an off-licence and swiftly pick out the most fabulous refreshing white from northern Italy, or the richest, fruitiest red from the Barossa Valley. But whereas wine experts - who know so much about so many boring things (such as soil structure and vine diseases) that they are actually borderline lunatics - have to pretend to be less well informed than they are, most apparently knowledgeable people are just faking it.
The sorry truth is that, when it comes to choosing wine, most of us are shallowness personified. Forget being seduced by microclimates and vinification techniques. Looks - and that means the label and the shape of the bottle - are what count.
Research shows that women are most swayed first by packaging, then by grape variety. Men, for once, make some attempt to be interested in personality. They look first to country of origin, then to grape variety, before falling back on aesthetics.
The Australians have turned labelling and branding into something approaching an art form - and have seen sales soar as a result - but it has taken the Old World quite a while to catch on. You can hardly blame it. Spin does not sit well with tradition. And the phenomenal success of heavily promoted drinks of questionable quality such as Blue Nun - which at its peak in the 1970s sold six million bottles a year - and Piat d'Or can only have made winemakers more reluctant to deploy the black arts of the marketing men.
Nowadays, you have to look quite hard to find a label so ugly that you'd be embarrassed walking into a dinner party with it. But there are plenty of little tricks that the marketers use to turn our heads and, oh, how gullible we are. First, we have a very emotional attachment to wine. It's not just fermented grape juice. Heart and soul have gone into its making, and it reconnects us with the land. That's what we like to think, anyway. This concept is the wine equivalent of the natural blonde - part reality, part illusion. "OK, chaps," say the marketers, peroxide at the ready. "How about a name that incorporates something that will suggest the lush verdancy of the grape-growing area. Vale would be nice. Hill's not bad. You might consider valley or creek. Or peak, even. Oh, did you say this place gets very misty? And you're on the coast, aren't you? What about Cloudy Bay?"
Pictures on the label - images of mountain peaks and vineyards receding into the distance - are another good ruse. Amateur enthusiasts are likely to be tempted by sketches of a castle or manor house - the chateau - such as those often used on bottles of Bordeaux. You can practically feel the history seeping through the label. Cunning winemakers in the rather less well-regarded areas of Cahors, Corbieres and Minervois in southern France have begun to copy the idea, no doubt hoping to create subliminal associations with Bordeaux and thus push their product upmarket.
But for every person lured by intimations of tradition, there is a style buyer who chooses wine like he does art. He likes a fuss-free label (perhaps in a peculiar shape; perhaps no label at all) with lots of space and striking lettering because, you know, it looks really cool.
Still, for both the fashion victim and the wannabe wine expert, colour is crucial. Steve Barton, who recently set himself the uphill task of launching a Romanian wine (Prahova Valley), found that we prefer dark, warm, intense colours - in particular reds and dark blues - to pastels.
Meanwhile, German winemakers have been busy ditching their traditional brown, taper-necked bottles (the vinous equivalent of a pair of chocolate-coloured corduroy trousers), using clear, shouldered ones instead, and replacing the old Gothic script with modern lettering.
Are you feeling manipulated yet? Well, here's something for the design agencies to bear in mind. When a sample group of female drinkers from Manchester were asked what they looked for in a wine, their answer was unanimous: high alcohol content. So much for psychological warfare.
