The future of wine debated in ‘Mondovino’
By Julie Brown-Micko

Wine is dead, moans Amié Guibert, one of the wine makers featured in Mondovino. “And cheese. And fruit.” He sadly continues. Well, the jury’s out on cheese and fruit, but there’s life in wine yet, according to the opinionated oenophiles in Mondovino. In fact, a battle is raging for the future of wine.

On one side, huge multinational corporations, with the help of slick professional wine consultants, maximize profits by creating carefully engineered “critic-friendly” wines that will sell to a market that slavishly follows the dictates of a few powerful experts (i.e. Robert Parker). On the other side of the equation is the humble family-owned vineyard. These small-time vintners make quality wines that are less saleable because their unique flavor may not be to a critic’s taste. The small guys get squeezed, the big guys eagerly gobble up prime land and the marketplace is flooded with soulless, cookie-cutter corporate wines. Beauty and artistry give way to mediocrity and profits. It’s clear within 10 minutes which side of the debate filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter is on.

But Nossiter’s preference doesn’t detract from his thorough (sometimes too thorough) exploration of wine making and marketing in the 21st Century. Fluent in French and Italian and a trained sommelier, Nossiter can speak to his subjects as an insider, but he is wise enough to shut up and let them share their own insights, brilliant or flawed as they may be. Some wine luminaries are unforgettable: The eccentric Hubert de Montille, a retired French vintner who rants against rigidity and order in wine making. Michel Rolland, a slick, jovial consultant who calls himself “the flying winemaker,” jets from vineyard to vineyard dispensing his wisdom. The wealthy, business-savvy Mondavi family are all about growth and acquisition, but are foiled in an attempt to buy rich lands in Bordeaux by Aimé Guibert, the melancholy French winemaker who claims, “It takes a poet to make great wine.”

Sometimes Nossiter’s personal quirks distract from Mondovino. For example, there’s an undue focus on dogs. Every time one wanders on camera, from a scruffy farm dog to a posh aristocrat’s purebred, Nossiter films the pooch. I like dogs as much as the next person, but it’s really too much. How does it help me to know that Robert Parker has a flatulent bulldog? Also, Nossiter uses a shaky, handheld camera that may suggest a raw, immediate and unfiltered access to his interviewees, but it just made my stomach queasy after 40 minutes. You may need to look away from the screen from time to time.

The film is a hefty 135 minutes and this is the shortened version released in the U.S. Fascinating though it is, tedium sets in well before the conclusion. Still, despite its long run time, shaky camera angles and preponderance of canine footage, Mondovino has much to offer.