Ayer or so ago, I was contacted by Jonathan Nossiter, the creator of the wine documentary “Mondovino,” which opens today in New York. He importuned me to appear in his forthcoming movie. I’d never heard of Mr. Nossiter and have never met him. But as he described his documentary, something didn’t smell right. So I declined with thanks. Subsequently, he tried again to enlist me, to no effect.

I had the chance to finally see “Mondovino” at a private screening and found myself breathing a huge sigh of relief at having dodged a bullet. The documentary, so called, turned out to be nothing of the sort. “Mondovino” is, instead, pure agit-prop, a willfully deceitful piece of antiglobalist propaganda of the heavy-handed sort unseen since Greenpeace started filming the bludgeoning of baby seals.

Mr. Nossiter, 43, was previously a waiter and sommelier in New York and Paris, as well as the creator of other documentaries. He is the son of the late Bernard Nossiter, a foreign affairs reporter for the New York Times. Because of his father’s peripatetic job, Mr. Nossiter is enviably multilingual, which talent is on display in “Mondovino” as he interviews subjects in French, Italian, Spanish, and English.

“Mondovino” purports to reveal the underbelly of soulless globalist wine forces such as the Robert Mondavi winery, wine critic Robert Parker, and France’s globetrotting wine consultant Michel Rolland, whom the movie portrays as a villainous profiteer. In contrast, Mr. Nossiter parades a variety of French, South American, and Italian winegrowers who are meant to represent the threatened, but oh-so-soulful “real people” of wine.

The problem is, these voices of humble wine humanity are often nothing of the sort – and Mr. Nossiter surely knows it. For example, the star of the show is Hubert de Montille, an entertaining, articulate, Burgundian winegrower who is, effectively, the voice of the romantic winegrower. An unknowing viewer – which means most viewers – would have no reason to believe that Mr. de Montille is anything other that the dirt-under-his-nails Burgundian vigneron displayed in the documentary. Yet he’s far from that.

Mr. de Montille does indeed make wine in the village of Volnay. But he’s no paysan as Mr. Nossiter would have you believe. Rather, Mr. de Montille has long been a prominent lawyer in Burgundy with a lucrative career in Dijon. He’s no more a “man of the land” than George W. Bush is a cowboy. But nowhere in “Mondovino” are you told – or even given a hint – that Mr. de Montille is anything other than a genial old Burgundian codger wresting a precarious living from his handful of precious acres in Volnay and Pommard.

This duplicity flickers through “Mondovino” like a kind of cinematic Potemkin village. Little is as it seems. Producers in Bordeaux and Tuscany whom Mr. Nossiter dislikes are pointedly, and gratuitously, asked about collaboration with the Nazis or involvement with Mussolini – which subjects are apropos of nothing in the film. It’s maliciously done to discomfort those being interviewed. The “good guys” are asked no such historical questions.

Much is done, subtly and unsubtly, to make the “bad guys” – the moneyed producers, consultants, various globalists – look grotesque. They are often shown in close-ups, the better to convey their purported grotesquerie. The camera work is literally jiggly. I’m told that Mr. Nossiter used a small camera placed on his hip, the better to make people less self-conscious. It also has the effect of making you feel like you’re often peering up at the subjects being interviewed.

The good guys are always shown in their vineyards, while the bad guys are in offices or getting in or out of expensive cars. The implication is that the good guys are somehow peasants, which is laughable indeed in the case of Mr. de Montille, as well as another featured producer, Aime Guibert of Mas de Daumas Gassac in the southern French town of Aniane.

Mr. Guibert spearheaded the opposition to Robert Mondavi establishing a vineyard and winery – and thus competition – in his village. Railing against big producers and wine consultants, Mr. Guibert is never shown inside his own sizable winery (he has 99 acres of vines), nor is any mention made of Mr. Guibert’s own use of consultants when he established his winery.

And so it goes – excruciatingly slowly. “Mondovino” is a two-hours plus exercise in malice aforethought. If that turns out to be your cup of over brewed tea – to mix a metaphor – you’ll be delighted to hear that Mr. Nossiter plans to release a 10-part DVD series to exploit the hundreds of hours of film never used for “Mondovino.”