Mondovino
The
name of this wine film is Mondovino and it was directed by Jonathan Nossiter.
This movie is also taking place in Brazil, Burgundy, Sardinia, Italy, and Napa.
This
movie basically follows wine critic Robert Parker, the “Wine Spectator”
magazine, the work of Michael Rolland of Pomerol, and the corporation based in
Napa. This movie looks at how big businesses in America have influenced
wineries in Italy and France into making all wineries and the wine business
pretty the same. By doing so, unique characteristics of certain wines including
the soil/habitat where wines grow is not as sacred and precious as it used to be.
In essence this movie is about global marketing, economic competition, and
cultural imperialism.
Michel Rolland, a wine consultant advocates
micro-oxygenation and tells wineries to adopt the Mondavi style of wine making.
Smaller wineries basically have to adopt this Mondavi marketing machine in
order to excel or they won’t succeed like some of the larger wineries. In
adopting this Mondavi marketing machine, they are nullifying their individual
expression in their wine and making standardized styles of wine. The issue is
that by making everything standardized and globalizing wine, there ends up
being no diversity in the style of wine.
This
film was filmed in the various locations mentioned above. It goes around the
world interviewing and getting insights from people on the wine industry and
methods of wine making all around.
This
whole movie talks about the culture of growing wine and how the wine industry
is being modernized. This movie is significant to a wine drinker and lover
because it goes into issues involving the way wines are made and how critics
influence the wines that people drink on a day to day basis. It is also talks
about how wine critics pretty much rate wines for political reasons and boost
certain wines into the spotlight.
This
film delves into ‘terroir’ which is basically everything about the habitat and
environment which contribute to the flavor and growth of a grape. Different
regions have different climates which
make certain wines unique to certain regions of the world. There is a huge
dispute about allowing micro-oxygenation because it brings about desirable
changes in wine texture and aroma which cannot be obtained by traditional
ageing. Obviously, some people want to maintain traditional methods of aging
grapes and using a regions ‘terroir’ to dictate how grapes will turn up. More
economic moguls would move for micro-oxygenation in order to obtain wines they
normally couldn’t in their wine region.
In
class, I learned about terroir and how winemakers use their own techniques and
environment to create a wine like no one else’s around the world. Winemakers
grow their wine in different ways and in different kinds of environments,
climates, soils, and landscapes. All of these factors including other personal
techniques contribute to the terroir of the wine and making the wine unique to
that vineyard and winemaker. Seeing that these big global marketing machines
are trying to remove this uniqueness to the wines upsets me because that takes
away the diversity and different flavors that multiple wines can offer. That
would be like taking every burger place and making it Mcdonalds instead of
having Burger King, Wendy’s, In and Out, Arbys, and etc.
In Burgundy, winegrowers have been isolated from many modern
world pressures. The wine in this region has been appreciated for countless
years. They have decided to discard chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and
pesticides and pursue finding ways to input personal expression in their wines.
Although they were intrigued into joining the global market in becoming a major
wine player, their old culture made them stick to their traditional ways.
In the early 15th and
16th centuries,
Italian families supported artists such as poets and painters as way of proving
their social/political power. Art, however, has been overpowered by the
influence of wine. It is more popular to have your name represented on a wine
label than to have your name associated with artwork. California has taken
advantage of this aspect by making progress in the global wine market and
influencing wine production in these old countries like Italy and France that
have set their eyes on the wine culture.
In terms of wine making, the movie touched on how traditionalists and the new
generation of technology winemakers make their wine. This new way of wine making has only been around for a decade. With technology, spoilage from
bacteria and other mishaps have been reduced. Even more recently, technology is
spreading around the world with the potential of nullifying all variations
caused by vintages and taking away environmental variables such as the climate
a wine is grown in. This new generation of wine makers is trying to make wine
consistent as opposed to traditional wine makers who look to grow wine in
certain environments, terroirs, to input their individual expression and self
into the wine.
I
thought this movie gave a good insight into how the wine industry is changing
and how measures are being taken to standardize the wine culture. I believe
traditional methods of growing wine should be maintained to promote diversity
and allow personal expression from various winemakers to be inputted into the
various wines.
Citing
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