The War on Terroir

Jonathan Nossiter says he never wanted to make a film about wine. The American filmmaker and sommelier thought it would be too hard to avoid the snob image that his favorite beverage often evokes. A slick portrait of oenophiles spouting pretentious adjectives as they decant a product the audience can only enjoy vicariously? No thanks. "That would have been worse than the cheesiest porn film," he says. Luckily, Nossiter, 43, overcame his reluctance. Mondovino, his documentary about globalization's impact on the winemaking business, is a quirky, subversive defense of Terroir: the idea that every wine ought to be a unique expression of the specific combination of sun, soil and human sweat that went into its creation.

Nossiter doesn't do Michael Moore-style voice-overs. Instead he uncorks his views through his characters' stubborn devotion to wine. The 21/4-hour film is a willful distillation of some 500 hours of rushes shot over a period of four years in vineyards located everywhere from the Brazilian rainforest to Sardinia to deepest Burgundy. In France, where Mondovino opened Nov. 3, the film has received mostly positive reviews and lots of buzz among wine lovers. It comes out in the U.K. next week, and in the U.S., Italy and Germany next spring. Nossiter is working his material into a 10-hour television series on the same topic, to be released sometime next summer. Far from a tiresome screed about the perils of globalization, Mondovino makes its argument by portraying the outsized personalities Nossiter finds across the spectrum of the wine-making world. We hear the emphatic musings of Languedoc vintner Aimé Guibert, who calls wine "mankind's quasi-religious relationship with the natural elements." Hubert de Montille, a hilariously irascible winemaker from Burgundy, points out that "where there are vines, there is civilization." Nossiter makes no bones about his allegiances. "We're in the thick of the battle for the survival of wine as an expression of individual complexity, up against the complex forces of homogenization," he says over a 2003 Fleurie and a hearty meal at Le Verre Volé, an artisanal wine bar near Paris' Canal St. Martin.

He claims there are no villains in his piece, but audiences might come to a different conclusion after watching Nossiter's interviews with figures representing those very forces of homogenization. High-end vintners from France to California hire Michel Rolland, a supremely confident consultant from Pomerol in the Bordeaux region, to upgrade their production. His lab can reduce a blackberry bouquet into its precise chemical constituents, and then tell the paying customer how to put them into his own vintage. After seeing the film, Rolland launched an ad hominem attack claiming Nossiter "must have grown up, like so many Americans, surrounded by Coca-Cola, hamburgers and The Muppet Show."

That weirdly parochial insult only highlights Nossiter's cosmopolitan approach. He finds nuance everywhere, including in his interview with Robert Parker, the redoubtable American wine critic who can make or break a vintage in the newsletter he produces from his Maryland home office, with his flatulent bulldog George and his basset hound Hoover in attendance. Parker says it's hardly his fault that his judgments have become the gold standard for wines across the world; he sees himself — with some justice, as Nossiter acknowledges — as a consumer advocate whose call-'em-as-I-see-'em sensibility broke the stranglehold of befuddled aristocrats in the Bordeaux region. But Nossiter suggests that with more and more vintners striving for the bouquet that Parker likes — and that consultants like Rolland can engineer — enough is enough. "One codified, restrictive system is being replaced with another," he says. Nossiter, who studied ancient Greek and has made feature films as well as a documentary about the gay raconteur Quentin Crisp, sees the real topic of his film as how culture gets transmitted from generation to generation.

The theme comes to the fore in his long conversations with Robert Mondavi and his two sons, Tim and Michael. When Michael shrugs off the Mondavis' failure to convince Guibert and his neighbors around the Languedoc village of Aniane to sell out, and suggests that one day there will be wine from Mars, there's a proud sense of dynasty. But a year ago, the Mondavis, who took their family firm public in 1993 to better underwrite their galactic ambitions, were squeezed out by the company's board. It's an irony that Nossiter savors as proof that the battle between the local and the global is not simple — nor is it over.