Chris Knipp
04-01-2005, 05:44 PM
Jonathan Nossiter: Mondovino
Dry, but fruity, and long on the palate
Review by Chris Knipp
Mondovino is an extraordinary documentary. It’s self-indulgent, quirky, opinionated, and overlong, but it’s also likely to become indispensable. This is because it’s a devastating anatomy of the growing conflict between terroir and globalisation – or as the French say, mondialization, of wine. Terroir is a rich and essential concept that embodies the whole milieu out of which good wine comes. The word terroir denotes the wedding of wine production with the soil (terre) the grapes are grown in; but by implication it also evokes the intimate relationship between a wine and the family of growers who make it, as very often they have done for generations, even centuries. For that matter, terroir means also the whole immediately surrounding culture, if there is one; and if there isn't, then wine has no soil to grow out of, and has no chance of achieving the nobility that true wine lovers seek.
It’s the peculiar genius of Mondovino that it slowly but irresistibly conveys an understanding of terroir and why it’s important, and why without it – due to encroachments of globalization brought about by big producers (even some of the best of them), big dealers, importers, experts, negociants, powerful winetasters and wine journals -- wine threatens to cease being one of the glories of civilized life and begins to become instead little more than some kind of expensive but standardized and homogenized mass-produced product on the international market, everywhere the same, nowhere of much real interest. Can that really be true? If not, why are the objects of the film’s attacks so angry, according to reports? Why has this film caused such a huge stir in France, especially Bordeaux?
People are passionate about wine, none more so it would seem than the maker of this film, 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 to be as fluent in Italian as he is in French, and perhaps in Spanish and Portuguese too. He’s often onscreen, addressing everyone in their native language, but it’s his camera that’s obsessed with sometimes annoying details, above all dogs. Never mind; he manages to get everybody to open up to him, including many of the leading “players” of the international wine market, and those who come off the worst in Nossiter’s documentary. And even the 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 winemaking 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.
We see how the Mondavis are quietly moving on, undeterred, to take over major wine producers in other countries, notably Italy, linking up with the old aristocratic Frescobaldi family, then buying their premium wine. Then, the year after that, the Wine Spectator, the now powerful market organ, declared that particular wine the “finest wine in the world,” and presto! Its price went up 35% in that single year. Coincidence? Hardly.
So 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 winemakers 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 winemakers 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 decideds 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 winemaking 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 onscreen 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.
__________________________
Informative French Mondovino site http://www.mondovino-lefilm.com/.
Dry, but fruity, and long on the palate
Review by Chris Knipp
Mondovino is an extraordinary documentary. It’s self-indulgent, quirky, opinionated, and overlong, but it’s also likely to become indispensable. This is because it’s a devastating anatomy of the growing conflict between terroir and globalisation – or as the French say, mondialization, of wine. Terroir is a rich and essential concept that embodies the whole milieu out of which good wine comes. The word terroir denotes the wedding of wine production with the soil (terre) the grapes are grown in; but by implication it also evokes the intimate relationship between a wine and the family of growers who make it, as very often they have done for generations, even centuries. For that matter, terroir means also the whole immediately surrounding culture, if there is one; and if there isn't, then wine has no soil to grow out of, and has no chance of achieving the nobility that true wine lovers seek.
It’s the peculiar genius of Mondovino that it slowly but irresistibly conveys an understanding of terroir and why it’s important, and why without it – due to encroachments of globalization brought about by big producers (even some of the best of them), big dealers, importers, experts, negociants, powerful winetasters and wine journals -- wine threatens to cease being one of the glories of civilized life and begins to become instead little more than some kind of expensive but standardized and homogenized mass-produced product on the international market, everywhere the same, nowhere of much real interest. Can that really be true? If not, why are the objects of the film’s attacks so angry, according to reports? Why has this film caused such a huge stir in France, especially Bordeaux?
People are passionate about wine, none more so it would seem than the maker of this film, 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 to be as fluent in Italian as he is in French, and perhaps in Spanish and Portuguese too. He’s often onscreen, addressing everyone in their native language, but it’s his camera that’s obsessed with sometimes annoying details, above all dogs. Never mind; he manages to get everybody to open up to him, including many of the leading “players” of the international wine market, and those who come off the worst in Nossiter’s documentary. And even the 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 winemaking 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.
We see how the Mondavis are quietly moving on, undeterred, to take over major wine producers in other countries, notably Italy, linking up with the old aristocratic Frescobaldi family, then buying their premium wine. Then, the year after that, the Wine Spectator, the now powerful market organ, declared that particular wine the “finest wine in the world,” and presto! Its price went up 35% in that single year. Coincidence? Hardly.
So 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 winemakers 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 winemakers 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 decideds 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 winemaking 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 onscreen 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.
__________________________
Informative French Mondovino site http://www.mondovino-lefilm.com/.