Ten years after Mondovino, his analysis of the increasingly standardised wine production in France, wine expert Jonathan Nossiter picks up the thread again and shows what it means to be rooted in the soil you're working on. During walks through the vineyards and relaxed gatherings with a group of alternative Italian wine growers, he trades experiences and arguments. What looks like a bucolic paradise, where intelligent people produce wine according to time-honoured and organic methods, is actually revealed to be a battleground. The DOC association, which is supposed to look after the interest of independent vintners, promotes winemakers who produce vast amounts in a standardised quality; and the agricultural industry with its hygiene regulations excludes traditional methods of production. The only thing saving the landscape from being totally destroyed is affluent foreigners using the old vineyards as summer holiday homes.
Reviews
This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
I am a wine enthusiast and huge fan of the natural/organic wine producers, thus I had high hopes for this movie.Unfortunately, this movie depicts only a small portion of the natural wine community. You see here portrayed only a few Italian producers (what about France? or Spain?), all coming from the same cultural background of the Italian left party. All filled with a sort of nostalgia for a Communism that never really arrived in Italy.Instead of talking about natural wine and what it means for producers and consumers, the movie indulges in giving space to conspiracy theories and peculiar views on life in general.This movie damages the natural wine movement as it portray is as something led by a few odd leftists with delusional ideas.Fortunately, natural wine is much more than this.
I saw this at a press screening and have a lengthier article about it in my column, but in brief, it doesn't match with Nossiter's previous Mondovino which took him five years to make. It feels like he sat down with a few Italian wine producers and chatted about the current state of wine over a couple of days--which is what he admitted to in the Q&A after wards. That's fine, but making an 83 minute film about it with oddly interspersed movie clips doesn't really make for enjoyable watching. It's really the last 10 minutes of the film that contain any meat and honestly, it should have started with that and delved in to what's happening to winemaking in the EU and those winemakers who are standing up to it, not just in Italy, but in Spain and France as well, the latter of which has the strongest natural wine movement in all of Europe.
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