Are you being lied to when you choose a bottle of wine?

Do you ever take a look at a wine label to see what the level of alcohol is? 

If that bottle of wine comes from Australia. New Zealand or the US then there is every chance you are being deceived. 

At a time when people are increasingly concerned about facts pertinent to their health, all three countries allow a tolerance of up to 1.5% of alcohol by volume on wine labels. 

That means a wine labelled as being 13.5% might actually be 15% - and completely legal. 

Leading international wine communicator Robert Joseph recently described the anomaly as “either laughable or reprehensible or both.”

And similar tolerance - sometimes more - can cover tolerance of grape variety/region/vintage. 

“One might reasonably say that, when it comes to informing the public, the wine industry is taking the proverbial piss,” says straight-shooting Joseph on LinkedIn. 

Figures released by the American Association of Wine Economists pinpoint the three major offenders, but others are also guilty. 

In an era when technology is easily able to quantify alcohol levels, such tolerance appears out of step with consumer demands. 

But, of course, labelling has long been a contentious issue.

It is not so many years ago that many French wines were "bulked up", or even comprised large percentages of fruit sourced in North Africa - not that you would ever have known it from the labels.