Mondovino
Written & directed by Jonathan Nossiter
Opens in Sydney and Melbourne on September 15
REVIEW BY BRENDAN DOYLE
Don't know your Beaujolais from your bubbly? You can still enjoy Mondovino in moderation. Corporate crooks, carping critics, feuding families, poets and dogs abound in Jonathan Nossiter's documentary about globalisation and winemaking. From Tuscany to Argentina, we meet those engaged in the battle for wine's soul, between a capital-intensive industry and a culture of human values.
Nossiter, who has worked as a wine consultant, first takes us to meet the small wine-growers who do it for love. Yvonne, in south-west France, says "I planted vines when my husband died. Ever since then, all this love inside me, I give it to the vines." And Battista, in Sardinia: "We have a millennial culture. We ought to live in tranquillity on this earth. And there's room for others."
Then we're in the Merc with Michel Rolland, jetsetter and the most influential and highest-priced wine consultant in the world, the first to make wine in India, who consults in 12 countries, including Australia. (Did you know that Jacob's Creek is owned by French multinational Pernod-Ricard?)
"Wine is dead", announces Aime Guibert, pioneer of quality winemaking in the Languedoc region of France. "It takes a poet to make great wine", he says, not a marketing manager.
And so we come to the Mondavi Winery in Napa, California. The Mondavis produce more than 100 million bottles worldwide. In the words of Michael Mondavi: "We want to start a dynasty. It would be great to see our heirs making wine on some other planets."
Using a handheld digital camera, which gives him easy and sometimes secret access to the individuals who own and control much of the wine we drink, Nossiter takes us into the living rooms of some of the Rothschilds of this world, from Bordeaux to California. But he doesn't take sides and is open to all expressed views.
I asked Nossiter if he saw himself as a sort of Michael Moore with regard to the wine industry. "Michael Moore is odious to me. He is the proof of the meaninglessness of a certain adoption of ideology. His cinema world is entirely Manichean, which demonises the other, which insults the potential intelligence of the audience and presupposes their inability to think for themselves. I can't imagine anything more opposite to my intentions ... I'm interested in human beings and human experience, in understanding those people I disagree with violently.
"The way watching a film works is through incremental shifts in your human sympathy and then in your intellectual understanding of things. I was constantly surprised making the film. I found myself often in imaginative sympathy with people with whom I had nothing in common ...
"I couldn't imagine having less in common with the de Montille family of traditional Burgundian aristocrats. We are on opposite ends of the voting urns. Yet I found myself in absolute sympathy with his deep form of resistance to the greatest threat to our liberty and our dignity, the forms of crypto-fascism that prevent us from being ourselves. His notion of being a libre penseur, his fearlessness in calling into question mechanisms of power, his position of ethical resistance.
"The core of the film is the notion of terroir (the soil), which is a beautiful metaphor for the survival of diversity and respect for the other. That's why Burgundy is the grail of the wine world. Let's not make a brand wine and lump everything together. The most radical gesture today possible is this defence of terroir. To be a terroiriste is to defend the dignity of yourself and of all others. It's a notion of universal respect."
Whatever you may think of Nossiter's analysis of political subtleties, his film is an engaging, funny, compelling and entertaining exploration of the world of wine, and above all of the very idiosyncratic people who make a living, or a killing, out of it.
From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005.
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