Tangled Vines
Cultural politics move to the vineyard in smart, cautionary "Mondovino"

It's tempting to expect the wine documentary Mondovino to be some sort of companion piece to the popular fiction film Sideways. We expect a lot of hoity-toity types sniffing their glasses and pronouncing judgment in absurdly overwrought language. But happily, Mondovino is about much more than the world of wine. The subject is wine, but it could just as easily be art, books, movies, cabinetmaking, or any other creative endeavor in the modern world, where faceless global conglomerates are moving in to absorb the smaller artisans, co-opt their product, and squeeze out any trace of stubborn individuality.

The film was made with great skill and expertise by Jonathan Nossiter, whose fiction films and documentaries have won praise at film festivals for a decade. The American-born son of a journalist, and raised all over the world, Nossiter is also a onetime sommelier; he not only knows his wine, he's able to speak to winemakers, brokers, laborers, and merchants in France, Spain, Italy, South America, and the U. S. in their native languages. The result is an intimate look at both the business and the increasingly endangered craft of winemaking.

Nossiter visits tiny old-school artisan winemakers in Sardinia, Italy, and the Languedoc and Burgundy regions of France, regions where winemaking dates back to medieval times. "Where there is wine, there is culture," says merry, irascible Hubert De Montille of Burgundy. "Wine is a religious relationship between man and nature," adds Aimé Guibert of Languedoc. "It takes a poet to make a good wine."

Less poetic in outlook are the Mondavi family at their palatial estate in Napa Valley. Still smarting from their failure to buy out M. Guibert's tiny label (they sniff it was all the doing of a newly elected Communist mayor), the Mondavi's go into partnership with the Mouton Rothschild family in Bordeaux, as well as two aristocratic Tuscan winemaking concerns in Florence. A more insidious influence in the wine world is globe-trotting "consultant" Michel Rolland, also out of Bordeaux, who visits client winemakers in 12 countries exhorting them to modernize their operations, to "micro-oxygenate" their wines so they can be drunk faster in the competitive global marketplace.

The vines become more tangled when Nossiter introduces Robert Parker, of the Wine Advocate, a critic so influential his nose and palate are insured for a million bucks—and a close personal friend of Rolland. While European vintners won't say it in so many words, Nossiter suggests they've begun to alter their product to suit Parker's famous palate. For one thing, many wineries are shifting over to "new oak" barrels (one critic calls it "the vanillatization of the wine"), the taste du jour championed by Parker, Rolland, and the Mondavis for the burgeoning U. S. market.

New York wine merchant Neal Rosenthal terms it "evil" that new oak is being applied like make-up to mask the individuality of the wine. "Once this stuff is put on," he declares, "the wine has lost its soul." Small European winemakers decry the cultivation of brands over character ("Wine has to reflect the place it comes from," says one, "otherwise, it's just a brand"), and accuse the U. S. (via the Mondavis) of trying to "impose their culture." Meanwhile, Parker sees himself as the great populist "revolutionary" tilting against what he calls "the caste system" of traditional winemaking.

At two and a quarter hours, the film is quite long, as Nossiter delves into personal family dynasties, from the great ruling-class Frescobaldi and Antinori families of Florence, to the small-scale De Montille and his winemaking son and daughter in Burgundy. (Nossiter's camera also spends a lot of time lingering over the pet pooches of his interview subjects.) The filmmaker also visits emerging wineries in Brazil and Argentina (one of which is co-owned by Rolland), and includes plenty of lovely vistas of grape-growing landscapes in Tuscany, France, and South America.

Even if you know or care nothing about wine, Mondovino is fascinating glimpse at how marketing works in an increasingly homogenized world. The resistance of small French vintners to the Mondavi takeover, says Rolland, shows "they are still peasants." I say viva la France.

MONDOVINO A film by Jonathan Nossiter. A THINKFilm release. Rated PG-13. 135 minutes. (***)
Review published in Good Times, April 14, 2005