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Wine's World

In Mondovino, filmmaker and former sommelier Jonathan Nossiter finds culture, corruption, danger and hope in the bottom of a wine glass.

By Tamara Wieder

Mondovino could be considered Dallas Among the Vines, says filmmaker Adam Nossiter. “It’s set in the world of wine, but it’s no more about wine than Dallas was about the oil industry,” he says.

Jonathan Nossiter is on a tear, railing against homogenization, globalization, civil liberties. Think he’s talking politics? Think again: Nossiter is talking about wine. And that’s exactly the point. The state of the wine world, the filmmaker and former sommelier argues, is a clear reflection of the state of culture in a post-Reagan society — a troubling mirror, worries Nossiter, who maintains that “we’re living in a very black time.”

In his challenging new documentary, Mondovino, which will be screened at Zeitgeist June 14-16, Nossiter takes viewers across three continents and deep into the heart of the warring wine world, a world fraught with conflict between billionaire businesses and peasant producers, commerce and culture, modernity and tradition. The result? “I think it’s a complicated picture of the human side of globalization,” Nossiter says.

Q: How’d you get interested in wine in the first place?

A: I started working in restaurants in Paris when I was 15, and that was a pretty healthy introduction to the power of getting drunk happily. I think there’s something about drinking wine that makes people want to talk. I think wine is the only thing that allows you to get high and get more lucid.

I worked in restaurants from then on and got a degree as a sommelier. Gradually, as I started to make films, I kept the wine thing going just because it was a pleasure to be a part of that world. I mean, I couldn’t stand the snobbery of it, but I loved what was real about it. Wine is, I think, the only thing on earth as infinitely complex and diverse and unpredictable as human beings.

What I gradually started to see in the ’90s was that there was a radical shift going on, and I started to see that this thing, which was all about being different each time, was getting more and more the same. The stuff was all starting to taste the same, whether it was coming from California or Bordeaux or Chile. And that really freaked me out. I started to traipse around, just to see what it was like on the ground, if this was just some market aberration, or was there something important happening, a shift? I thought I was going to spend two months of my life doing this. I thought it was going to be a little project. As a filmmaker, I got drawn into the outrageous soap-opera aspect of the wine world. I definitely felt like I was doing Rich Man, Poor Man among the vines. And then I started to see that in fact there was a war going on in the wine world that seemed very similar to the war — the taste and culture and lifestyle war — that I think was happening in this country and happening across the world between the forces of homogenization — trying to make us into robots and trying to rip us off into believing we’re getting choice when we’re not — and the beautiful, individual acts of resistance to these forces. I mean, thank God resistance is strong, at least in the wine world, if not in the political world against (President George W.) Bush.

Q: Is this the film that you originally set out to make?

A: For me, the principal pleasure in making a film is to live a new life and discover new things. If I don’t feel like I’m alive and being constantly challenged and discovering and being surprised, then I can’t expect the audience to be also. We all know what cookie-cutter bullshit most Hollywood films are now, and unfortunately a lot of independent films [are too]. I am very conscious of wanting to do something which is fresh and feels fresh to me and surprises me. I thought I was going to spend two months doing some funky little thing, and it’s ended up occupying four years of my life. I guess what I started to realize is that I felt like a private investigator. The film to me is like a cross between a comedy and a thriller.

Q: I read a quote where you said, “This is not a film about wine.” So how would you describe it to people who haven’t seen it?

A: You could call it Dallas Among the Vines. It’s set in the world of wine, but it’s no more about wine than Dallas was about the oil industry. It’s a setting. The last thing I ever wanted to do was make a film about wine, because I couldn’t imagine anything more pretentious and boring. I think that the world of wine has always been a really accurate mirror of the world at large, for a simple reason, which is that wine is agriculture, but it’s also high culture. It’s just a bunch of grapes growing out of the ground, but it’s also been linked, since the Bible, to our dreams, to our fantasies, to our pretensions, to our illusions. And that means that it’s a kind of amazing indicator of where we’re at. I think it’s a complicated picture of the human side of globalization that comes out. It’s not black and white. It’s not all the fault of American multinationals.

Q: Was it a scary thing for you to try to combine these two loves — filmmaking and wine — into one project?

A: Nah, because to make a film where I could get drunk by 10 a.m. and call the producer and say I was working — that’s too big a lure. The only thing that was daunting was to try and avoid descending into the unbearable winespeak and all of the pseudo-connoisseurship and all of that stuff that I can’t tolerate, that I think turns people off from wine. I thought it was very funny, the parodies in Sideways. Unfortunately a lot of the wine world is exactly like they described. These unbearable, pretentious wine snobs, who take all of the fun and all of the beauty out of this thing.

Q: How did that snobbery trend start?

A: I think it’s always been there to some extent. I think that in the past, wine was two things: it was accepted by most people just as a simple part of the way of life, and then there was sort of a high end for the rich and the elite, where they would make a big snooty deal out of it. Americans got turned on to wine really starting in the ’70s — ironically, in great part thanks to Robert Mondavi, who did a lot of good for the world of wine. The descent of the Mondavi company has been, I think, a mirror of the terrible things that have happened in American political and cultural life in the last 30 years. I think what happened is Americans started to get turned on to wine in the late ’70s and early ’80s, [which] was exactly the time when American society got transformed by the Reagan revolution, where suddenly greed was good, where the notion that we live in a community and we have communal responsibilities was thrown out the window. And also Reagan made dumbness good. We think that Bush invented this, but he didn’t. Reagan opened the doors for a kind of mass infantilization. We see it in Hollywood. For me, the golden era of Hollywood was the ’70s: Cassavetes, Monte Hellman, the early films of Scorsese and Coppola. Raw, experimental, exuberant American spirit, open-minded, tolerant, always unpredictable. Not always perfect ….

Not accidentally, American wines of that time were the same way. What happened with the Reagan transformation of American society [was that] suddenly big business moved into wine. It became a symbol of power and prestige, just as American wine drinkers were getting turned on and were becoming an important force in the whole wine world. But we’re insecure about our knowledge, so it was very easy for people to start to invent ways of talking about wine to turn it into this closed club system, and to intimidate us.

I don’t think it’s accidental that in ‘80s Reagan America, we saw films that got dumber. Suddenly this era of ’70s experimentation was transformed into simplified plot lines, big special effects to distract us from the fact that we’re getting dumbed down. The same thing happened in wine. But then the wine prices started to skyrocket. It became a big speculative business, and American big business started to impose its economic and political needs on the wine world. And many Europeans started to follow suit, because they saw this is where the money is. That’s why I think today we’re in the middle of a pitched battle for the survival of wine as culture.

Q: Whom do you expect or hope this film will appeal to?

A: Absolutely anyone who never thought twice about wine. It’s absolutely intended for people who never imagined that wine was interesting or important to them. And it’s absolutely not for any wine snob who thinks they already know everything. In fact, I’ve seen it: they get pissed off by the film. Because it challenges the idea that the existing power structure in the wine world is great. That it is worth spending an extra 15 or 20 bucks for X or Y bottle of wine just because there’s a heavy marketing campaign or [because] so-called journalists who have a vested interest one way or another in promoting this idea are trumpeting it. People who bought into this world are made really uncomfortable by the film, because it asks questions about what’s actually happening.

Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten?

A: Positive and negative. At least in France so far, and Italy, independent-minded people seem to be excited that the code of silence has been challenged. Whether they agree or disagree with parts of the film, they see it as opening a dialogue and challenging the status quo. The power brokers in the wine world want to kill me. I’ve gotten threatened with lawsuits; I’ve gotten threatened with a lot of stuff.

Q: Does that surprise you?

A: Yes and no. I got hijacked by the film, but it became this mad obsession. Everyone thought I was crazy. My agent dropped me in the middle of it. He said, “You’re throwing your career away.” He said, “You’re never going to make another film again, and no one’s going to see this,” and I thought he was right.

Q: But you didn’t stop.

A: I was too interested by what I was doing. But I was scared. We didn’t have much money. Before we sent the film to Cannes, I didn’t know if anyone would see it, and it was miracle we sent it to Cannes, and then to be put in competition, my jaw dropped. Fortunately, the film seems to in fact have struck a chord with non-wine people. So that protected me and the film from a lot of the attacks. I expected that the Wine Spectator or the big Mondavi or Antinori families that control so much of the wine world, I thought that they would be a little disturbed, because the film asks questions, but I thought we still lived in a democracy. I thought they’d be open for debate. They’ve tried everything possible to stifle debate and to try and intimidate us.

That, unfortunately, I think is a gauge of the extent to which democracy is in trouble. I think we’re at a really, really dangerous point. The struggle in the wine world to defend individual rights — to express your individuality, as a person and with wine as an expression of place — I think is an accurate mirror of the struggle to do that in Bush’s America. I think unless we all wake up and fight back, all of us, every single day, in every single thing we do, I think we’re in terrible danger.

Q: How do you envision the future of wine and the wine industry?

A: I feel really encouraged by the number of people everywhere, rich and poor, big and small, left and right, who are just simply saying, “[I must] fight for my identity, and the identity of where I come from, and find a new way to express that.” And in a sense there’s never been as much good wine available. The problem is, like movies, there are hundreds and hundreds of great movies that no one will ever see, because the channels for distribution and exhibition are getting strangled every day. We thought when multiplexes came in, great. That was one of the great excuses, that “you’re going to get a lot more choice.” Well, it’s bullshit. It’s fake choice. So I’m worried — like I’m worried for movies, like I’m worried for politics — that unless every single person realizes that every time they go to a movie, buy a bottle of wine, buy a pair of shoes, vote, or speak their voice, unless they do that with a conscience, that their civil liberties and their individuality are being eroded. I’m afraid that we’re not far from an I, Robot world, a world of homogenization in which on the surface we think we’re all different, but we’re getting turned into clones.

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