What’s behind the buzz

It was a surprise hit at the Cannes Film Festival, then a box-office sensation throughout France -- both a succes d’estime (the critics loved it) and a succes de scandale (many people in the wine world hated it, and a few threatened lawsuits over it).

It is “Mondovino,” a documentary about the increasing globalization and homogenization of the world’s wines, and while it won’t open in this country until next week (in New York) and late next month in L.A. (April 29 at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles), it’s already creating big buzz in local wine circles.

“Mondovino” has had invitation-only screenings for the media and/or wine lovers in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and ever since it was screened for several dozen wine lovers in Beverly Hills early this month, cyberspace has been filled with their commentary on it.

I’ve received at least two dozen e-mails about “Mondovino,” and virtually every serious wine person I’ve met recently has asked, “What do you think of ‘Mondovino’?”

A documentary about wine -- especially one that so few Americans have yet seen -- may seem an unlikely topic for so much chatter, but Jonathan Nossiter, who made the film, insists it’s not actually about wine.

“I didn’t want to make a film about wine, and I’m glad I didn’t,” he told me when he was in Los Angeles recently. “I can’t imagine anything more boring or pretentious than filming a bunch of people sitting around drinking wine and using the world’s most ridiculous vocabulary to describe it.”

Well, yes. But Nossiter, 43, an award-winning filmmaker, has made a film that is very definitely about wine.

“Mondovino” is a jeremiad on what Nossiter sees as a struggle for the very soul of winemaking, a global war between Old World traditionalists who want to make wines from indigenous grapes, wines true to their terroir, and greedy, power-mad entrepreneurs and their acolytes who all want to make the same kinds of simple-minded, easy-drinking wine everywhere in the world, pushing out the old-timers.

A simplistic view

In “Mondovino,” everyone who has had any success, power or wealth is depicted as evil, and anyone who’s a peasant or who seems to be a small farmer turned winemaker is good. The world just isn’t that simple, though, and some of Nossiter’s heroes run pretty big operations themselves.

Oscar Wilde once said that the only artists he had known who were “personally delightful” were “bad artists.” Good artists, he said, “exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.”

But Nossiter is far more interesting than his film. He’s intelligent, provocative, able to explain in compelling terms what’s happened in recent years to winemaking and filmmaking and society at large.

His film, however, is simplistic, reductionist, heavy-handed and unfair.

Nossiter is the son of the late Bernard Nossiter, a highly regarded foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post and New York Times, who died in 1992. The Nossiters were always on the move -- India, France, Greece, Italy, England -- and as a result, Jonathan speaks six languages and is comfortable in at least as many cultures.

“Mondovino” is clearly the work of someone steeped in politics and world history. Nossiter likens the small wine growers in Burgundy to the French Resistance during World War II, opposing the “collaborators” in the movement toward a globalized taste in wine. In conversation, Nossiter criticizes Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for the “dumbing down of American culture,” “the infantilization of taste,” the “choking off of free trade and real diversity” and “the glorification of greed and oligopoly” that he says led directly to the “homogenization and infantilization” of the world’s wines and of Hollywood movies.

Nossiter clearly sees himself -- or at least one part of himself -- as the cinematic heir to his father’s journalistic tradition. And yet there is nothing even faintly journalistic about “Mondovino.”

Although Nossiter went to great lengths in our interview to distance himself from the Michael Moore school of propagandistic documentary making, “Mondovino” is the viniculture version of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

“What I don’t like about Michael Moore’s movie,” Nossiter told me, “is that he sees everything in black and white, and reduces everything to the most infantile level.”

But in “Mondovino,” Nossiter does exactly what he accuses Moore of doing in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” In fact, I came away from my interview with Nossiter thinking, “I didn’t see the movie he thinks he made.”

The primary evildoers in “Mondovino” are Michel Rolland, the French wine consultant who advises hundreds of wineries in 12 countries; Robert Parker, the all-powerful wine critic; and the Robert Mondavi family, which is seen trying to stretch its dastardly tentacles into the virgin soil of France and Italy.

Nossiter’s thesis is that these folks -- Rolland and Parker in particular -- are destroying the individual, indigenous nature of the world’s wines by helping to make (in Rolland’s case) and then praising (in Parker’s case) just one kind of wine everywhere in the world, regardless of local traditions and terroir.

There is no question that in an effort to tap into the lucrative American market in particular -- to appeal to what is known, variously, as the “California” or “American” or “international” palate -- an increasing number of wineries throughout the world are making wines that taste very similar and that ignore native grapes and native culture.

Rolland is the consultant to many such wineries, and Parker has awarded high scores to many of their wines, thus ensuring their high prices and rapid sales and encouraging others to emulate this approach to winemaking.

But it is also true that there are more good wines available now, made in widely varying styles, than ever before -- and many of them are made from indigenous grapes.

As Parker told me last week, “The diversity of wine styles and the number of artisanal winemakers are far greater now than when I started writing about wine 25 years ago.

“How many world-class wines were made from Italy’s indigenous grapes -- Aglianico, Nero d’Avola or Piedrosso even a decade ago? Look at the Rhone, where 25 years ago you had maybe half a dozen famous estates in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Now you have 50 or 60 good estates making serious wine.

“How about Spain, where so much wine was industrial swill 25 years ago, and you now have glorious old vine cuvees of Mourvedre, Tempranillo, Mencia and Grenache/Carignan as well as great wines from such exciting new regions as Toro, Priorato, Jumilla and Bierzo.”

Nossiter is probably best known for what he calls “fiction films,” among them “Sunday,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. But he has also made several documentaries, including “Searching for Arthur,” a study of director Arthur Penn.

Before he turned to filmmaking full time, Nossiter spent 15 years as a waiter, sommelier and wine consultant to restaurants in Paris and New York.

A four-year effort

He initially looked on the making of “Mondovino” as an opportunity to return temporarily to that world, to take a brief break between two fiction films. He wound up spending four years, traveling to three continents and interviewing more than 300 people to make the picture.

“I was overwhelmed by the intensity and complexity of the family relationships I found in the wine world,” he says. “It occurred to me that there is something quite magical in what happens when children inherit land and vineyards from their parents and then try to express themselves concretely through the land and the grapes and wines the land yields.

“It’s a vast, global soap opera -- ‘Dallas’ among the vines -- and it’s also a very accurate mirror of the world at large. And yet wine is the one product on Earth that is both agriculture and high culture. I love potatoes, but society’s aspirations are not captured in the potatoes we eat.

“All that seemed to me to make for a good breeding ground for a film.”

Now, he says, he’s going to turn the film -- and hundreds of feet of outtakes -- into a 10-part DVD series.

The DVDs may sell well in France. Wine has long been integral to the culture there, so it isn’t surprising that “Mondovino” made the front page of Le Monde, the country’s most prestigious newspaper. But all the early chatter notwithstanding, it’s difficult to envision hordes of Americans trooping to the theater or buying the 10 DVDs.

Of course, Nossiter may have a secret weapon. Dogs. Dogs are everywhere in “Mondovino.” Everyone involved with wine seems to have at least one dog, and they get a lot of time on camera. Nossiter sees them as characters in his movie, “the real masters of many of these [wine] domains,” as well as emblems of “the details, the particularity of each place I filmed.”

The dogs mostly seem to appear, though, as symbols of Nossiter’s black-and-white world. The good guys -- the traditional Old World winemakers -- have cute, cuddly dogs. The bad guys -- the globalists -- have fierce, barking dogs. Or worse.

Nossiter says that even though he’s a cat lover, he couldn’t resist Parker’s frequently flatulent English bulldog, George, omnipresent when Nossiter visited the wine critic at his home in Monkton, Md., camera in hand.

“Here’s a guy whose nose and palate are insured for a million dollars, a guy whose judgments affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide,” Nossiter says, “and he’s got this big, farting bulldog. That’s a detail I couldn’t make up.”

Maybe he should have named the movie “The Million-Dollar Nose and the Farting Bulldog.” That might attract a larger American audience.

Unfortunately, flatulence does seem an apt symbol for this film. Had it been fashioned more evenhandedly, it could have triggered a worthwhile debate, both in the wine industry and among amateur wine lovers, about the making and the marketing of wine in the modern world. It might even have engaged many non-wine folks.

As it is, “Mondovino” will mostly trigger discussion about how poorly the film is made, and it will appeal only to those who are already convinced of its thesis ... and only if they can stay awake for its full, interminable 2 hours and 15 minutes.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.