Alarmist, sensationalist and garbled but, like the curate’s egg, good in parts, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, What’s in Your Wine, broadcast on September 15, has “appalled and concerned” more than one nervous reader. No doubt it set out to highlight, quite rightly, some of the daft anomalies between the wine and food industries, but it was soon floundering. Its central point, that wine should be transparently labelled in the same way as food, just doesn’t stand up.

Bizarrely, it continues to be illegal for wine producers to list the additives, preservatives and other ingredients used in production on labels. The wine trade’s defence is that the list of possible ingredients is so extensive, and in any case varies according to each batch of wine, that it would be impractical.

But what no one took the time to explain, but which I’ve mentioned many times before here, is that almost all the items used in wine production pass rapidly through each vat, or barrel, and rarely end up in the finished and bottled wine. Those that do are often only present as minuscule trace elements.

Compare that with two foodstuffs I picked at random from the shelves of my local Tesco Metro. Adults might savour its Finest Horseradish Sauce – labelled with milk, egg and yeast allergy advice – complete with dextrose, lactose, guar gum and xanthan gum, sorbitol humectant, citric acid and metabisulphite preservative. Yoplait’s Frubes, or fromage frais in tubes aimed at children, contain glucose-fructose syrup, modified maize starch, calcium phosphate, anonymous flavourings, guar gum “stabiliser”, citric acid “regulator”, potassium sorbate “preservative” and “beetroot red” colour. Yum.

By comparison, the average bottle of wine’s preserving sulphur, inoculated yeast to ensure a rapid and complete fermentation, and sugar to boost alcoholic degree, all looks pretty tame.

It is true that certain yeasts are picked by winemakers to enhance and extend grape flavours. And occasionally this does result in too much of a good thing: the early Aussie chardonnays sent here in the mid-Eighties all displayed a distinctive, samey tropical fruit character due to one favoured yeast.

It helps to know that popular brut champagnes are not the sugary confections that Dispatches warned us against. Due to the high level of natural grape acidity in this cool northern French region, even champagnes with as much as 12g residual sugar per litre (15g is the limit for a brut champagne) still tastes fresh and balanced.

But the dig at those of us who drink ordinary, great-value wines that, yes, may well have seen oak chips in the fermentation tank, and probably contain a dash of residual sugar, is neither kind nor helpful, and smacks of elitism. There is a time and a place for these on everyone’s table.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue