MONDOVINO
But what I did get was incredibly interesting. This is documentary about some of the really big issues of life today, which happen to intersect with the world of wine. As to the world of wine itself the film is worthwhile seeing. One sees into the families of the great names in wine: Mondavi, Rothschild, Frescobaldi, Antinori, Boisset, Parker, and others less famous. And, as is so often te case with documentaries, what the people say inadvertently tells a great deal about themselves that they don’t mean to tell. When one of the Mondavi sons, an officer of a large public company, starts to talk about growing wine on the moon, it’s enough to make you rush to the telephone to short that stock. And when Mrs. Staglin boasts about her generousity in giving T-shirts to the Hispanic workers, after a verbal tour of her sculpture garden, it’s clear that the subjects had no chance to edit the film and make themselves look less silly. The story, if it can be called that, is the true history of a small town in the striving Languedoc area of Southern France. The powerful Mondavi family came into town, made a “deal” with the Socialist mayor to begin purchasing land and set up a major wine producing facility (in an area where jobs are badly needed). A majority of the towspeople, after thinking about the project, lobby against it, and eventually defeat it b y voting out the mayor and replacing his with the local Communist candidate. Mondavi retreats in defeat, but goes on the form joint ventures with Rothchild in California and Frescobaldi in Italy, as well as others in South America. The philosophical issue is why these poor souls rejected the Mondavi group, and the economic promise it held for them. This is explained by two elderly gentlemen, one from Burgundy, and one from Sicily, that try to explain the “meaning of life.” In addition to the philosophical issues, the film is full of humor, including a number of camera shots of the various dogs owned by the subjects. But nothing is more humerous than lisiting to the Mondavi brothers explaining why they were rejected by the French: they don’t have a clue to what happened, or to the meaning of life from a European point of view. On a larger scale, the film is about the effects of modern culture and its dissemination on the treassured old ways of the past. There is a lot of subtlty; for example, the only wine producer that offers the film-makers a bottle of his wine is a poor South American Indian farmer who earns $60 per month. Not Opus One, not the fabulously rich Staglin family with their treasured art works described by Mrs. S, and not Sr. Frescobaldi, who rushes past his wife while she is on camera, replying to her question of when he will return by saying that he is in too much of a hurry to answer. The film leaves unanswered whose actions are more humerous, those of the people or those of their pet dogs. There is a lot about the wine industry that can be learned from the film. The interconnections between Robert Parker and oenologist Michel Rolland are most interesting, as are the comments about the rating methods used by James Suckling and the Wine Spectator magazine. Robert Parker himself explains his view of the effects of his rating system, and his influence, on the wine industry. Others point out differeing views. In the final analysis the message I gleaned from the film is that fine wine used to be made in a way that permitted it to age slowly and develop into something wonderful. As the economics of the wine industry have slowly intruded onto the small producers, and sales become dependent on “ratings,” the winemaking styles have changed so that more oak is used, more hi-tech processes such as “micro-oxigenation” and the wine is ready to drink sooner, but never ages into that something wonderful. Only a very few have resisted the trend, and even the children of the faithful are being seduced into working for the monoliths. The larger implication is that this same process of “branding” everything we use is causing us to lose an important part of our cultural heritage.ADDITIONAL ARTICLES |
A TOUCH OF FRANCE IN HAWAII