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One of the most useful lessons of college is that an awful lot of what you thought you knew was wrong. Sometimes, it’s just an everyday loss of innocence – the discovery that the world is a lot more complex than you’d thought back in high school – but sometimes, it’s a dawning realization that you’ve been…gasp!...lied to by people you’d trusted.

Of course, there’s also the sort of lying intended to separate people from their innocence…but that’s Jeannie’s column, not mine.

Wine, too, has its shades of grey, its misleads, and its outright lies. Take wine labels. You probably think you know what’s in a bottle of 2005 pinot noir from the Russian River Valley, right? Guess again.

In the States – different countries have different rules, and some states have stricter standards than others – if there’s a single grape variety listed on the label, the wine only has to be 75% that variety. The rest could, in theory, be anything. Even a grape of a different color. Similarly, only three quarters of the grapes have to come from the identified geographic location. And the vintage isn’t sacred, either; up to 15% of the wine could be from a different year. In other words, the above-mentioned wine could be one quarter zinfandel, 25% Temecula, and 15% unsold leftovers from the 2003 vintage.

Does any of this really matter? In one sense, no; of course, the primary concern is whether or not the wine’s any good. But these sorts of legal misleads and omissions lead to a pair of problems. The first is that not knowing what’s actually in the bottle makes it harder to make informed choices about what you’re drinking. For example, a bottle of pinot noir mixed with zinfandel, which is a wildly different-tasting grape, is going to taste nothing like a bottle of pinot noir blended with the much more compatible gamay. As for geography, it not only matters whether the grapes come from the cooler Russian River Valley vs. the hot, pinot noir-unfriendly Central Valley, it’s a little annoying to pay a Napa Valley premium for a wine that might be, at least partially, from low-cost Lodi.

The second issue is that while this sort of labeling simplifies wineries’ marketing challenges, it leads the unwary consumer into incorrect conclusions. (See, alcohol really does cause bad decision-making.) For instance, some people claim that they like cabernet sauvignon but dislike merlot. The fact is, most wines identified as one are blended (often up to the maximum) with the other, which hides the individual grapes’ deficiencies and – at least usually – makes for a better wine. Some grapes can stand tall on their own, but the majority of them can’t. They need help. And even worse, people who fall in love with what they think are single-variety wines too often conclude that blends (either identified or, in the Old World fashion, “hidden” behind the name of a place) are inferior, when in fact they’ve actually been drinking blends all along.

Or, consider alcohol. To simplify the U.S. wine law on this issue – and yes, of course there’s a law – there’s a 1.5% leeway in either direction for wines under 14%, and a 1% leeway for wines over 14%. Thus, a wine labeled 12.5% could actually be 14%, and vice-versa. Though some people are very sensitive to such shifts, for most casual drinkers that relatively small change isn’t such a big deal. But what if the “leeway” is much bigger than that? The only way to know the actual alcohol level of a wine is to run a lab test, something the government doesn’t have the time or resources to do for every bottle that roams these shores. Yet a rather large number of wines – some of them domestic, many of them foreign – seem to carry exactly the same alcohol, year after year. That’s…unlikely. Again, what’s most important is how the wine tastes, but knowing whether a bottle is 11% or (secretly) 17.5% before deciding to split it over lunch can make the difference between an active and a very drowsy afternoon.

That’s just the legal stuff, though. Things can get more interesting. For a few decades and until recently, many California wines made from what people thought was roussanne…a white grape best-known in its Rhône Valley incarnation…were actually made from viognier, though no one knew it at the time. That was just an error, not deliberate fraud, but the latter happens as well. Like a chardonnay that happens to be about half muscat, or a sauvignon blanc made from more grapes than the winery had access to, or a Tuscan wine made with a healthy addition of already-fermented wine trucked in from Sicily in the dead of the night. Or an open bottle of cassis liqueur that…oops!...accidentally tips into the barrel of wine. Just like it did last year. And the year before.

On second thought, I take that first paragraph back. Cassis in the syrah, Everclear in the prom punch…wine isn’t like college, it’s like high school. Lord help us.

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)