MONDOVINO. I've been meaning to post something on "Mondovino," the semi-controversial wine documentary that touched down at Zeitgeist in New Orleans for a few days last week. It goes on forever and ever, and much of its argument -- basically that capitalism is killing wine, as Billy Bragg might have put it -- struck me as disingenuous or naive. But I still enjoyed watching it.
     The director, Jonathan Nossiter, is the son of a New York Times diplomatic correspondent (and, according to Steph, the brother of one of the AP writers in Louisiana). The filmmaker is thorough, and to his credit his interview subjects tend to let down their guard. Elderly Bordeaux and Burgundy vignerons who make traditional wines come of as curmudgeonly but endearing. Particularly Hubert de Montille, who hands over control of his estate to his humorless son but whose soulmate is a daughter who's gone to work temporarily for a modern wine conglomerate.
     Meanwhile, an executive for that company, along with everyone else who makes a more "international" style of wine, comes off in the movie as shallow, soulless, misguided or evil. Michel Rolland, a wine consultant, looks like an ass in "Mondovino," and maybe he is one. James Suckling, an obsequious wine critic from Wine Spectator, lives up to his name.
     But Nossiter also lets on that everyone who hires Rolland or does business with the Mondavi family or gets good ratings from Robert Parker is a barely disguised fascist. A member of the Antinori family defends an ancestor's support for Mussolini; an Argentine estate owner makes racist comments about indigenous people; a California winemaker expresses himself to a Mexican migrant worker in broken, condescending Spanish.
     It's icky to watch. But Nossiter doesn't subject old-style wineries to the same withering scrutiny. My uneducated guess is, not every winemaker who collaborated with the Nazis went on to get 97 Parker points (and vice versa). And you might well find a National Front voter or two among the sort of "terroir" winemakers that the movie celebrates.
     The movie does give you a flavor for how the international wine business operates. But you might walk out of "Mondovino" thinking that traditional winemaking is a fragile flower that just popped up out of the gravel, untouched by the filthy hand of commerce. Which is nonsense. Thanks to one set of business trends, there's long been an international market for French wines built for drinkers who buy by the case and store bottles for years before uncorking. More recently, a different set of trends has created a market for a different type of wine. If the pendulum has swung toward big, dark, fruity, extracted reds, it will likely swing back in another direction eventually.
     In the meantime, enough with the gloom and doom. Sheesh.
 :: posted by Dante at 8:17 PM
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W.B.W. #10: WHITE PINOTS. I tend to like white wines from Oregon. So for this month's virtual wine tasting, hosted by My Adventures in the Breadbox, I picked up the 2002 Seven Hills Oregon Pinot Gris for $12 or so.
     Come to find out, this is a lively, sturdy wine with only a hint of the grapefruit flavors that jump out of a lot of other wines made with this grape. There's a lot of cantaloupe in the nose, along with a little bit of honeydew and maybe cardamom. When you first taste it, it's fruity but not a fruit bomb; it's just restrained enough. The finish is zippy and leaves a tingle on the side of your tongue. On the downside, the fruit dissipates when you sip on the wine for a while. Still, I enjoyed this wine, which stood up OK to an Asianish barbecue beef dish I'd made. (Pork would have been a better match.)
     Gary wasn't so generous; he found the wine to be harsh and didn't want much to do with it.
     Seven Hills turns out to be based in Walla Walla, Wash., but they make wines with grapes from all over the Pacific Northwest. They seem to be pretty indifferent to the 2002 Oregon Pinot Gris, because I couldn't find a word about it on their Web site. The back of the label merely describes the winery's approach: "Always our emphasis has been to augment and elevate the expression of terroir arising from the meticulous viticulture and low yields of our chosen vineyards."
     Ad copy like this is the wine world's equivalent of dot-com-era blather about "integrating synergy solutions" and "harnessing collaborative web-readiness." Which is to say, windy, meaningless nonsense. It distinguishes Seven Hills from... well, nobody. No winery would ever admit, "We buy leftover grapes from anywhere and try to make up for it in the lab."
     In any case, if I were jonesing for an Oregon Pinot Gris, I'd probably stick with the one from Adelsheim. But the Seven Hills Pinot Gris is tasty and works well with food. I'd give it a 12.5 or 13 out of 20.
 :: posted by Dante at 9:01 PM
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