Mondovino

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.

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.

I was expecting a lot from this movie, and I can say I haven't been disappointed. First of all, this movie, as a world tour of wine making, let the spectator enjoy beautiful places. The people interviewed are really interesting and funny too, in particular Hubert de Montille. The shooting may be confusing, the camera always being unsteady and often focusing on secondary elements in the backgrounds. You may not like it, but I don't consider it as a defect.

The themes raised in the movie may be kind of confusing as well, since globalization isn't the only issue discussed. But Nossiter managed to give his movie a consistency all along. A great achievement of this movie is revealing all the characters involved in the wine industry as they really are, avoiding a cliché "Good against Evil". This could be the main difference between "Mondovino" and Michael Moore's documentaries; Nossiter's point of view appears in a subtle way, through opinions expressed by his favorite characters. The richness of this documentary relies mainly upon the characters, the history of long-time wine-making families, such as the De Montilles, the Mondavis, the Antinori and the Frescobaldi. Nossiter lets the spectator discover that wine is somehow related to families, rather than just being a business and an industry. This movie doesn't make you want to drink wine, but certainly make you want to discover vineyards and wine-makers.

I watched this movie as a student in Enology, and let's just there are many ways to learn. I give this documentary 10 out of 10, despite his technical particularities.

It is truly interesting to have the opportunity to read all this disappointed reviews now, that the documentary has more than ten years. All the silly comments about the directing that wasn't enough "movie" and glamorous as expected. All the silly comments about the director that, in a "war" between the old world, European style of wine, and new world, Californian style, push for the first when it's clear that the winner is the second. Now history can tell us who is the winner...

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.