‘Mondovino’ pokes holes in wine’s mystique

A single shot in Jonathan Nossiter's “Mondovino” reveals its true focus.

Patrick Léon, co-CEO of wine producer Mouton-Rothschild, chattily describes his company's prowess, but the camera focuses on a worker tinkering with a gutter in the background. Léon may be in the picture, but the real action lies with the guy who's getting his hands dirty.

Nossiter sets up this split again and again: a proud peasant sensibility that he connects to the soul of winemaking versus modern corporate interests and their global reach, which he views as wine's greatest threat.

It's no surprise, then, that he chooses early on to feature Battista Columbu of Sardinia, who describes his work with the malvasia grape as an “ethical commitment,” a broadside against global consumerism's vast powers.

“Poor people also have the right” to make wine, Columbu insists.

While "Sideways" has gotten all the attention, a very different film is setting some big names in the wine world on edge.

Nossiter's “Mondovino” (ThinkFilm) is a love letter to maverick winemakers around the world, but it's also the wine equivalent of “Fahrenheit 9/11”: a screed against what he views as darker forces of globalization, which squeeze the individuality and the terroir — wine's sense of place — out of the bottle.

“Imagine a world in which you've eliminated all foods which are not sweet and sugary,” Nossiter says by phone as he sets up a new home in Brazil. “That's where we're heading in the wine world.”

A Sundance-winning director and son of Washington Post and New York Times correspondent Bernard Nossiter, he comes well prepared for his latest project. Raised in France and trained as a sommelier, Nossiter helped craft the wine lists in New York restaurants like Balthazar.

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His would-be villain is Michel Rolland, self-described “flying winemaker” and mega-consultant. Couched in the back of his cruising Mercedes, his reach extends from his Bordeaux labs to Napa, Argentina and South Africa. Nossiter's lens captures him as he juggles cell phone calls, laughs with eerie gusto and exhorts clients to “micro-oxygenate” (the use of tiny bubbles to soften wine's tannins and punch up its taste).

Rolland speaks glowingly of his wines' “style.” When questioned about personal taste, he quips, “Yeah, it's called diversity. That's why there are so many bad wines.”

Unlike Michael Moore, Nossiter is a largely spectral presence in his own film, but his view is clearly that what Rolland views as a style is little more than a homogenization of taste, so that Bordeaux wine and Californian wine and Argentinian wine all taste the same — critically lauded but insipid, with little trace of their true origins.

Rolland has disavowed from the film, claiming at one point it was “reductionist, distorted and unfair.” In France, especially, the film has sharply divided the wine elite, who see Nossiter's film either as a long-needed broadside or a hatchet job.

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