I had mixed feelings about this film.

It seemed to me to be a great opportunity squandered. Let me explain. First, I was surprised by its lacklustre technical qualities: dour, full of dark shots out of car windows, badly lit faces and weird camera angles. We first meet Tim Mondavi via his midriff, before the camera eventually finds his face. I felt I was sitting through a very long amateur video. When you consider how photogenic much of the wine world is, this was quite an achievement. Secondly, the editing was far too indulgent. It would have been a much better film if it had been at least 30-45 minutes shorter.

There were clips included which told us nothing at all, such as the snippet from Jurançon at the beginning and the piece from Brazil at the end. One had the feeling that since the team had shot them, they were determined to include them, even if they didn't advance the argument and merely wasted time. The narrative (where there was any) wasn't well told, either: the Mondavi-Guibert spat was very hard to follow if you didn't know the story already. My main criticism, though, was that Nossiter missed (or ran scared of) his target. His film was intended to show the damage that globalisation is doing to the wine world. I agree wholeheartedly with this. The problem was that all the villains were missing. He concentrated on a few easy, statistically irrelevant targets in Europe, yet in general Europe is struggling rather than flourishing at all levels of wine commerce except the fine-wine category.

Globalisation, meanwhile, is being profitably delivered by the world's biggest wine company, Constellation Wines, and by Gallo, and by Diageo, and by the other four companies which (with Constellation Wines) produce seventy per cent of all Australian wine. The vehicle these cuckoo companies use to claw open markets, evict the opposition and then consolidate their position are brands, gorged and fattened with copious spending on advertising, promotions, marketing and discounting, too. (The "recommended retail price" of many large brands in the UK is a fiction, since these brands are invariably sold at a discount or via multi-buy mechanisms.) It is these companies that produce the most dreary and disappointing wines in widespread global distribution. Yet for many consumers, wine begins and ends with these big brands. Wine for these (often new) consumers is no more exciting a purchase than breakfast cereal or toilet paper. That, for me, is the truly destructive effect of globalisation in the wine world.

So where was Nossiter's interview with Gallo, with Blossom Hill, with Rosemount-Southcorp (as it then was), with Yellowtail or with Pernod-Ricard? Where were the men in suits? Was he afraid of their lawyers? Instead we get a duck shoot in which Nossiter goes after Boisset, Magrez, Rolland or the hapless Mondavis, making as he does so full use of every exploitative and mendacious editing technique known to budget docu-makers. The fact that Mondavi was gobbled up by Constellation (and the fine-wine gristle spat out shortly afterwards) illustrates just how misplaced his target was. Nossiter attacked the rabbit in the headlights, not the juggernaut itself. The new generation at Boisset, at it happens, is now doing a fantastic job in Burgundy, as I know to my own cost, since much of what I wrote about the company in The New France (true at the time) is no longer true.

Not everything Bernard Magrez turns his hand to is successful, but he has been behind some superb wines over the last decade (Pape-Clément 1998, for example) and I greatly admire his enthusiasm and energy. Even if you don't like every wine he makes, they are nearly always many times better than what the same vineyards were producing just a year or two earlier. Michel Rolland, in particular, is travestied. I have met and interviewed him several times myself, and the overwelming impression I had was of a good-natured, jovial and energetic man who loves wine, enjoys being a sought-after consultant, relishes travelling the world and is very happy with the stash of money he's earned. I didn't recognise the Machiavellian cheroot-smoker in the back of a chauffeur-driven car barking orders for formula wine down a phone. Are all Rolland wines the same? In that case, you won't be able to tell the difference between Ste Roseline in Provence and Ausone in St Emilion. I bet there isn't a single person reading this who couldn't instantly split the two in a blind triangle test.

The most telling criticism of Rolland in the film came from Michael Broadbent, who says that he tends to make wine in a Pomerol-like image. This is true. But what you tend to get from a Rolland consultancy is a Toro Tempranillo, a Colchagua Carmenère or a Mendoza Malbec with a Pomerol-like softness and amplitude … yet those wines are still principally Toro Tempranillo, Cochagua Carmenère or Mendoza Malbec. They are not wines with the place taken out, like Gallo's Garnet Point. And, as with Magrez's wines, they are usually a vast improvement on what went before. Nossiter intercut material from the protests connected with the Social Forum in Florence with his interview with the Frescobaldi family, hinting that a Russian or Cuban Revolution on the Arno was just a raised fist or two away. Ludicrous! The truth is not one of the protesters would have cared whether or not Frescobaldi has a half-stake in Ornellaia. It is totally insignificant. But if Yellowtail or Constellation put half of Tuscany's poorer, cooperative winegrowers out of business by destroying their export markets, then that would interest the protesters a lot. Once again, the real villains were absent.

It also annoyed me that some absurd comments from the 'stars' went unchallenged by any other talking head in the film. I'm thinking of Aimé Guibert saying "le vin est mort" and "Bordeaux is finished …", or Hubert de Montille declaring that "Parker only likes wines which taste of oak."

Is the film documentary or propaganda? If it's documentary, then you need a counterbalancing opinion. Otherwise it's propaganda. My favourite moment in the film was watching the Haitian immigrants working for New York wine importer Neal Rosethal talk about terroir in terms of mango-ripening in Haiti. That was lovely. But it wasn't worth sitting through the rest. Before I leave the subject, I should point out what for me was the truly astonishing aspect of the film: its lavish media coverage.

Essentially Nossiter was saying something which lots of writers in the wine world had already said. He said it neither memorably in terms of the medium he chose, nor accurately. The theoretical point was a good one, but it was a dreary, low-budget, simple-minded, thumb-twiddling film which wasted all its time puffing after paper tigers. So why the coverage? Because it was a FILM about wine, not yet more "wine writing". The fact that it was a film got it out of the wine ghetto. Great! So all we need now is a good film ...