By Sudhir Muralidhar
Web Exclusive: 04.01.05

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To the growing number of American corporate symbols that make the rest of the world recoil -- McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Citigroup -- add the lesser-known but no less aggressive Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley. The Mondavis control a $500 million global wine empire, with vineyards from California to Chile to Australia. So it came as a surprise when the local community rebuffed the powerful Mondavis in their attempts to buy land in the wine-rich Languedac region of Bordeaux, France. Uniting behind messages of cultural and corporate imperialism, the citizens of Languedac elected a communist mayor who ran on an explicitly anti-Mondavi platform and forced the American wine conglomerate to purchase land in Tuscany instead.

This tale is recounted in the provocative new documentary Mondovino, which opened last week in New York and will be showing across the rest of the country in the coming weeks. Of the recent spate of anti-corporate documentaries that have populated art-house theaters this past year (a group that includes films from the anti-fast-food polemic Super Size Me to the more economically populist The Corporation and The Yes Men), Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino is by far the most personal, and, as a consequence, one of the more powerful. The subject matter may seem a little abstruse -- Mondovino centers on the globalization of the wine industry and the standardization of taste trumping cultural individuality -- but the message is clearly universal. As he takes his camera across six countries and numerous vineyards, Nossiter suggests that truly unique wines are just the latest casualty in the ongoing battle for economic survival in the global marketplace.

The filmmaker knows what of he speaks. A former sommelier in the cutthroat New York fine-dining scene, Nossiter started work on Mondovino as an angry oenophile, eager to champion the more distinctive wines he favors that get lost in the numbered ratings and narrow American tastes of such critics as Robert Parker and the editorial staff of Wine Spectator.

For consumers whose primary considerations when purchasing a bottle of wine are price and, on special occasions, color, the technical distinctions explicated in Mondovino may seem rather esoteric. But you needn’t know your favorite terroir wine or understand what micro-oxygenating means to grasp the bigger picture, or to enjoy the larger-than-life characters who populate the wine community. Foremost among them is Michel Rolland, a French wine consultant and good friend of Parker’s who services more than 100 wineries and says that the lack of his guidance is the only reason there are so many bad wines on the market. In Nossiter’s eyes, Rolland and Parker represent much of what is wrong with winemaking today -- the almost oligarchic control by a few key corporate and media figures over what was once a diverse, cultural, and artistic process.

Not surprisingly, Mondovino has already created a stir in France and among big names in the wine industry, who have been quick to offer denunciations of the way they have been portrayed. For the most part, though, the complainers have only themselves to blame. But there is more than a shred of truth to the accusation that Nossiter does not play fairly. In fact, beyond being too long and featuring some pretentiously unwieldy camera work, the film’s main flaw stems from Nossiter’s inability to keep his personal biases from weighing down his otherwise compelling argument.

A good example is Nossiter’s misdirected ire toward Parker. Nossiter told The Village Voice that he views Parker as the “perfect expression of Bushism, because there's a veneer of bonhomie, human sympathy, and down-to-earthness, which is precisely what allows him to go so far in his inability to acknowledge the rest of the world.” At one point in Mondovino, Nossiter asks Parker, “How does it feel to affect billions of dollars of other people’s livelihoods?” It is a question that is coated in cleverness, and you can tell that Nossiter is struggling to hide his satisfaction when Parker responds that he doesn’t think about it much. But what is the right answer to that question? Is Parker supposed to say that he thinks about it everyday and that he alters his opinions so some poor winegrower in Argentina can reap a bonanza? Nossiter offers nothing to suggest that Parker has been intellectually dishonest in picking the wines he likes and dislikes, which exonerates Parker from the only real crime he can commit as a critic. Parker may be the perfect expression of Bushism, but Nossiter displays the worst traits of effete liberal snobbery in the way he treats him.

Still, given how passionate Nossiter is about his cause, it is impressive that Mondovino is largely a model of restraint, eschewing the more in-your-face methods of Michael Moore in favor of a more passive, observational approach. If Fahrenheit 9/11 is a political cartoon, Mondovino is more like a quirky New Yorker article, albeit a rambling and occasionally misguided one. Mondovino may not have many answers for the questions it raises about cultural globalization and the effect of commercial demands on agronomic production, but it is provoking a worthwhile debate. Like other products of the land, wine has a storied, diverse history that goes back thousands of years. It would be a pity if the coming chapters in its story were determined by only one taste.

Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.