Mondovino

Mondovino is an extraordinary documentary. It's self-indulgent, quirky, opinionated and overlong, but it's likely to be indespensible, because it's a devastating anatomy of the growing conflict between authentic local production (the French key word is "terroir") and the globalization of wine by which family origins are forgotten and the emphasis is on quick satisfaction, forward flavor, and standardized tastes.

The maker of this film is Jonathan Nossiter, polyglot, sommelier, happy tippler, photographer, director, and star interviewer in his documentary film – which began as a quickie, but wound up taking four years to make. Nossiter appears as fluent in Italian as he is in French, and perhaps in Spanish and Portuguese too. He's often on screen, addressing everyone in their native language, but it's his camera that's obsessed with sometimes annoying details, above all dogs.

Never mind, though; he manages to get everybody to open up to him, including many of the leading "players" of the international wine market, including those who come off the worst in Nossiter's documentary. And even those dogs turn out to have meaning. Isn't one's dog the clearest metaphor for a person's true nature?

It's obvious Nossiter likes Battista Columbu in Sardinia and Hubert de Montille in Volnay best – and it's obvious why. They're different sorts of men: Columbu is radiant and serene, de Montille querulous and acerbic. But they stand equally for what may be a vanishing world -- one where wine-making is authentic, personal, local, humane, where it's identified with place of origin not brand, done for pride of craft not profit, or – what the Michel Rollands and Mondavis want – for worldwide, nay, universe-wide market domination. Both dream openly on camera of making wine on other planets and of selling it to everyone.

De Montille comes across as mattering more than the Mondavis or any of the other aristos and plutocrats. He has only a few hectares. He makes wine that's severe, edgy, not for everyone – like himself -- and long-lasting. He's true to himself. A big focus of Mondovino is how the California Mondavis – who've already collaborated with overblown first growth bordeaux Mouton Rothchild to produce a pricey California hybrid, Opus One, since the Eighties -- recently tried to get hold of a big slice of burgundy. But a communist mayor took over the town from a socialist one and the sweetheart deal was off.

The Wine Spectator becomes, as Nossiter shows, one of the manipulators, and manipulation is an essential aspect of globalization. So too is Robert Parker, of Monkton, Maryland (who gets interviewed and his flatulent bulldogs thoroughly photographed). Parker has always been independent, but his wine ratings (and his taste) have come to wield too much power over the world wine market. French wine-makers are terrified of him, and that situation has undermined their independence. Parker, it turns out, has long been very friendly with Michel Rolland, a super-star French wine consultant (whose Mercedes limo we get to ride around in), and it turns out that the kind of heady, forward, fast-developing wine Parker likes is also what Rolland encourages wine-makers to produce – and globalization means not only eliminating small producers but homogenizing wine styles. Hence Rolland's ebullient charm is suspect, but so are Parker's so-called authenticity and independence.

The richness of Nossiter's picture comes out in the way he delineates wine families and their different, sometimes squabbling, members – most of all the de Montilles, the stubborn, feisty and wise old Hubert; his energetic son Etienne, who works for the powerful negociant, Boisset; and his daughter, Alix, in personality closer to Hubert, who decided to leave Boisset because they want her to lie -- to put her seal on wines she hasn't supervised the making of.

Nossiter's eye and ear can be devastating. The rich Staglin family in Napa Valley emerges as self-congratulatory and self-deceiving nouveaux bores. Their and other ruling wine families' condescension, outright racism, and covert or past links with the fascists and even the Nazis is another of the persistent filmmaker's gradual revelations. As one Nossiter interviewer has said, "don't get him on the subject of Berlusconi and Bush"; but Berlusconi is just fine with the wealthy Italian wine-making families.

Another sympathetic dissenter to the globalizing bandwagon is New York wine importer Neal Rosenthal, who knows the importance of terroir and the inroads against it. Rosenthal was present as a speaker after two of Film Forum's afternoon showings of Mondovino -- a local hero, of sorts, for the documentary's US premiere.

It's hard to do justice to the film or even list its full roster of figures. Michael Broadbent, longtime Wine Director at Christie's, a dry, aristocratic Englishman, once a leading authority and wine tastemaker, now eclipsed, as all are, by Parker, appears on screen to fill in the central role the English played in the growth of France's finest wines. Bernard Magrez, head of a huge Bordeaux dealership; the Antinoris of Florence (aristocrats with fascist lineage). . .the list goes on and on. One doesn't want to stop, and one sees why Nossiter's film is too long. Because it's all there in the details: this is what the controversy is about. Little things matter. Mondovino is annoying (the jumpy camera, the dog farts), but also riveting and important – a film not to be missed. And for the truly interested, there is a ten-part TV series from this material on the way.

Business vs. personal conviction. Profit vs. art.

As with any documentary that pits the capitalist large corporations against the small producer, the viewer will invariably have to take the side of one or the other based on their own believes. This is as much a documentary of the new standardized way of doing things that globalization is bringing us, against the old traditional ways where character and the art of making things matters almost more than getting the product sold.

If you have to remember one thing from this movie, it is that the masses can no longer decide by themselves, they just follow the taste of one or a couple of critics that tend to equalize and standardize taste in the same way as MacDonalds used to do for the fast bite (something Parker himself admits to in the film against a backdrop of a Burger King sign). "It is all about image" against content as another interviewee says. That is the easy way, the standardized way. Easier than taking the time for a nice wine to mature, easier than to forge your own taste by trying and trying yet over again. Controlled branded taste is easier.

There is a glitter of hope when even some of our cousins across the ocean agree that a few people are "levelling" the taste of wines to maximize the profits and ensure a maximum of it gets sold to the "grey masses". Individuality and difference is sacrificed for the extra buck. It is nice to see that not everything or everyone is giving in to standardization, even across the ocean.

As in many other areas of today's world, dominance of a few and reduced freedom of choice impacts us all... let everyone make up their mind and decide what to go for. Too much standardization kills the mind and taste; difference brings innovation and healthy competition and will allow for choice - and not just vacuum-packed "more of the same". Standardization sells easily and a lot, and brings everyone to the same level - the lower one.

On this, I am going to open up a nice bottle and wish you a hearthy "sante".

A very interesting documentary - certainly a lot more than Sideways, a pseudo wino drama - where the capitalist conspiracy is revealed in all its greed. According to the documentary - and confirmed by the recent publication of a biography on Parker - only two men dictate the nature of wines in the world: Robert Parker of Massachussets and Michel Rolland, a French wine industry expert based in Bordeaux and also known as a "flying winemaker". The director is clever enough to insert interviews of local wine producers from many different regions of France, from Sicily to Argentina and interviews of the biggest players in the industry such as the Mondavi family to uncover the wraps on the globalization of wine making and marketing. A must see for anyone interested in the dark side of the industry. Drinking a glass of wine will not be the same political and commercial act after watching this well made documentray.

Just saw this movie 2 days ago. A very interesting look at people and our world through the world of wine. I have no special interest in wine, and yet I found this very enlightening. The director gave me the impression that he has the ability to show people as they are. While he exposes a lot of things that are below the surface he manages not to take a stand and leave that for the viewer. He shows a lot of compassion to people (and dogs) and sympathy and let people tell their story and in the same time exposes what they don't want to tell.

The movie shows us where our world is going to, what are the benefits and what is the heavy price we pay. It is a movie about the love of wine and the love of making it big, personal and global, character and formula.

The real stars of the people for me are the older wine makers with their disillusioned look at the world and themselves.

It takes some time to get use to the hectic camera moves and editing, but it's worth it.

Highly recommended.

I saw this at the London Film Festival last night, apparently the shorter version. James McNally's summary of the content of the film is very good. Nossiter very deftly blends his investigation of the wine business into wider concerns about globalisation, homogenisation, the effect of the mass media, the power of capital and the need for diversity.

The film is shot on hand-held DV which some might find offputting, but which does enable Nossiter to catch people off guard on a number of occasions which probably would not have been possible using more conventional equipment.

Despite the sprawling feel of the film, the editing is very sharp, not only giving us a parade of the world's dogs, but also undercutting a number of interviewees' comments with somewhat contradictory visual images, and giving others sufficient rope to hang themselves. To a degree this evoked Michael Moore's recent work (although Nossiter operates in a more subtle way), but probably the roots of the film go back to Marcel Ophuls' "The Sorrow and the Pity", both in the way the film is constructed and in the emergence of 'salt of the earth' French peasants as the stars. De Montille pere et fils were present at the LFF screening and answered questions afterwards. We do indeed all need a little disorder - bravo Hubert!

Overall an excellent film with implications that go way beyond the world of wine into the way we construct ourselves as people, and organise our world.