As someone who drinks a fair bit of wine, allow me to make a heretical statement: French wine is overrated. This is not to suggest that the French are not capable of producing some truly fantastic quaffs, but let's be frank: If money is not an issue, by all means drink French wine. But if you have a few thousand yen on you and are looking for a decent bottle, you will have much better luck, on average, with New Zealand, California, or Italy than you will with France.

French wine has a reputation, and it trades on that in prices that often do not hold up to comparative drinking. (Though one should not underestimate the psychosomatic effect of price and vintage on many imbibers.)

"Red Obsession," a documentary on Bordeaux wines of the high-end grand cru variety, is entirely sympathetic to the opinion that the region produces the world's best wines — from vineyards such as Chateaux Lafite Rothschild, Margaux, Latour and Haut-Brion — but it nevertheless supplies a lot of evidence for the view that the area is overhyped.