In vino veritas: in wine there is truth. But is there? Unfortunately, the wine biz is a lot like other businesses in that there is a shortage of the commodity called truth. The history of the wine industry is riddled with fraud, deception and deceit. It’s called the Pinocchio factor.

There is a large distributor of wines and spirits known in the trade as “the evil empire.” They will do anything to sell wine, and when their salespeople try to unload some of their bad wine on me, John Williams’ Darth Vader theme from Star Wars pops into my head. The salespeople have some great wine in their portfolio, but they don’t mention that they’re actually pushing junk and un-salable merchandise. The goal for the company is to fill your shelves and backroom with inventory; whether it is salable or not is of very little relevance to them – they have their quota to fill, and that is that.

The salespeople think of themselves as pirates, gangsters, or something equally idiotic. They fill their accounts with trash, and hurt the profitability of many retailers and restaurants. They will still ship wine to you even if you don’t order it, hoping that you’ll keep it.

Most of the salespeople will say and do anything to get the sale. They often lie about the quality of the wine, its price and about discounts. One sales rep I encountered got so nervous about lying that he jingled his change in his pocket and kept pulling up his pants, as if his trousers would drop to his ankles if he told another fib. At the end of the month, when sales quotas must be met, the female sales reps’ dresses get tighter and shorter, their make-up gets a little thicker, and their necklines plunge even deeper.

Merchandisers are taught to pull the tags off their competitors’ product, move their competitors’ wine to the bottom shelf and bury the other guys’ bottles of vino behind their own.

At the winery level (and this has happened so often it’s ridiculous), a wine may have a very good reputation and be in high demand, but production will only be small – maybe 10,000 cases of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, for example – and suddenly production of the wine’s next vintage reaches 30,000 cases. Greed takes over: The winery is now buying from inferior fruit sources and the quality of the wine is diminished. The wine is diluted; manipulated at the winery by using flavor enhancers, high alcohol and oak. The average consumer would not notice the drop in quality, but the sales do invariably drop after a few vintages. Still, the money is in the house. Charles Shaw, the infamous “two-buck Chuck,” has been making fools of the public for years, putting their box wine-quality wines in a glass bottle and laughing merrily all the way to the bank.

There has always been the Pinocchio factor in Europe. The reason that the name of the winery is always on the cork is because of the rampant amount of fraud that has taken place on the continent for more than 100 years. Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) laws in France, Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) laws in Italy and Denominación de Origen (DO) laws in Spain were created to regulate the industry and control where the grapes are harvested, the amount of grapes used and the tonnage per acre. The idea is that if you buy a Spanish Rioja wine it will come from that region and use traditional grapes, and will have quality control in terms of aging, bottle time and so forth. Even in the last 25 years, however, British wine merchants have blended burgundies with inferior juice from North Africa.

The Italian wine world was rocked many decades ago when wine drinkers were poisoned because toxic substances had been added to the wine. The scandal, which almost destroyed the Italian wine industry, led to the creation of DOC laws.

In the good-ol’ U.S.A., we have appellation control known as American Viticultural Areas (AVA). For example, if you buy a bottle of merlot that is from Napa Valley, 85 percent of the grapes have to be from that area. This rule is abused on a regular basis, of course. If you buy a merlot, 75 percent of the fruit has to be merlot, but this is also abused by certain wineries.

Labels can be deceiving. Napa Ridge winery has been sued often by Napa Valley growers for not having enough Napa Valley grapes in their wines. The appellation says “California,” which means that the grapes can come from the Central Coast, Temecula or from you name it. But the average Joe buying a bottle of chardonnay only sees Napa on the label.

Chablis, chianti and burgundy are a few of the greatest wines in the world, unless they are from California, where they are blah jug wines. The abuse and harm that bulk-wine producers have done to the reputation of these fine European wines cannot be calculated.