Intoxication - a human right?

Feathers have been flying in the wine world recently. "Many wine writers," wrote wine writer Jane MacQuitty in The Times, 9 November last year, "have financial arrangements with wine concerns that must surely colour their judgment."

Names were named, and invective crafted in subsequent articles and letters in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. The controversy achieved little, though, with the notable exception of The Guardian's Malcolm Gluck agreeing to pay future royalties on the branded Superplonk wine he created for Tesco in 1995 to charity. Gluck had gone so far as to claim: "I like conflicts of interest," which must have made his editors chuckle indulgently. He later retracted the statement.

At about the same time, however, a much more wide-ranging attack on the wine world in general was launched by Stuart Walton, a self-proclaimed "loose cannon" among wine writers, in his often amusing book You Heard It Through The Grapevine (Aurum Press, £9.99).

Walton simultaneously published Out Of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99), an extensively researched account of drugs and drug laws and a well-argued tract in favour of the decriminalisation of drugs. Walton goes so far as to claim that intoxication is "a fundamental human right".

We met recently to discuss ruffled feathers, wine writers' payola, and whether Chablis and cocaine are siblings or distant cousins.

Wine first. Walton has, he says "a creeping sense of unease" about the wine world - "not everything in the global vineyard is lovely". Some of his targets are so riddled with the bullet holes of previous snipers that they are barely worth shooting at any more, such as the quality of basic Chianti and cheap champagne, the ethics of the press trip, or whether port terminology is confusing.

Much of the book, though, is devoted to what he told me is "the real scandal - why all wine tastes the same now", or as the book more archly puts it, "the drear chill of creeping standardisation".

Walton apportions the blame for this between the travelling Australian-trained winemakers so beloved of supermarket and high-street wine buyers - and those buyers themselves, whose strictly commercial aims have allowed this standardisation to take place.

The writers, meanwhile, have fallen undemurringly into the trap laid for them by supermarketeers, and churn out enthusiastic notes about the van-loads of free, standardised samples requested and delivered when copy deadlines press.

Other targets enjoyably popped at include the risibly vague food recommendations which appear on the back of wine labels ("these labels might just as well say 'whatever', and have done with it").

He is no less amusing about the fatuously precise food-and-wine tastings which specialist magazines like to organise. I was disappointed to find nothing in the book about Walton's celebrated run-in with the Masters of Wine, whose course he abandoned in disgust at what he felt was their administrative ineptitude, rapaciously high prices and tendency to fail the overwhelming majority of candidates.

He didn't bother, he said, because it was "an old story". You Heard It Through The Grapevine is, in sum, an enjoyable romp around the wings of the wine world, through the make-up department and down into the grubbier rooms of the basement where the hideous old props are stored. I recommend it.