A consultant in the back of his car, chauffeured from estate to estate, giving the same recommendation everywhere: “Micro-oxygenation!” That scene from “Mondovino” (2004) made Michel Rolland, the busiest oenologist in Bordeaux, the face of a debate. Jonathan Nossiter, a film-maker and trained sommelier, travelled with a hand-held camera through France, Italy, California, Argentina and Brazil asking whether the world’s wine was starting to taste the same, and who profited from it.
Two camps
The film sets up camps. On one side the great families and their networks: the Mondavis of the Napa Valley, who had founded Opus One with the Rothschilds, the Antinori and Frescobaldi in Tuscany, the critic Robert Parker, whose scores move prices, and Rolland, who at the time advised well over a hundred estates. On the other the stubborn: Aimé Guibert of Mas de Daumas Gassac in the Languedoc, Hubert de Montille in Volnay, who refuses to give up his tannic, long-lived Burgundies, and a couple of farmers in Sardinia.
To drop at the apéro
Bordeaux consultant Michel Rolland is chauffeured from estate to estate in the back of his car and gives the same advice everywhere: “Micro-oxygenation!” A cellar technique became the film’s running joke.
The vote at Aniane
The key scene plays out in Aniane, a village in the Hérault. The Mondavis wanted to plant a vineyard there on communal land; the 2001 municipal election returned a majority against the project, and the company withdrew. Guibert celebrates it as the village’s victory over the corporation, the Mondavis see a missed opportunity. The film never openly takes sides, but its editing makes clear where Nossiter’s sympathies lie, which earned him accusations of bias. From hundreds of hours of footage came a cinema cut of about 135 minutes, shown in competition at Cannes in 2004, extremely rare for a documentary, and in 2006 a ten-part series.
Twenty years on
Twenty years on, much of it looks prophetic and some of it dated. The fear of the “Parker taste”, ripe, oaky, soft, has given way to a counter-movement: natural wine, cooler sites, less new oak, earlier picking. Robert Mondavi’s company was taken over by Constellation Brands at the end of 2004, Parker retired in 2019. For your own glass the film’s question stands: am I tasting the place, or the method? A Merlot from Ticino next to one from Chile, tasted blind, gives a first answer.