BEFORE advertising and the culture of subjective comparison and competition came along to manipulate the minds of consumers, innkeepers would hang a bush over the front door to proclaim that the wine therein was good.

Today wine writing and competition supports a significant media cohort. When Australian filmmakers David Roach and Warwick Ross set about making “Red Obsession”, the vignerons of Bordeaux welcomed their presence. They co-operated with interviews and winery tours. It was publicity that money could not buy.

But the film’s core purpose turns out to be less to praise the great Bordelaise wines than to go somewhat antipodean and look at the Chinese wine scene. In 2010, the top prize at a prestigious UK wine competition went to a Chinese label.

I like wine, for its taste, low calories and beneficial complicity with good food. But as the film observes, by implication and somewhat tongue in cheek, wine’s economic mystique can lead fools into paying too much for a beverage that obeys gravity’s immutable laws on its journey through the human body. As Shakespeare observed, “sleep, nose painting and urine” (Macbeth, Act 2, scene 3).

Planting vines in an arid region where little grows may seem a folly. But it’s happening in China and the film spends useful time investigating it. Compared with the verdant beauty of the vines beside the Gironde, the Chinese vineyards may not be visually pleasing, but, as the old saying goes, “Good wine needs no bush”. Nor does it have to cost the earth.

At Capitol 6 and Palace Electric