Interview

.. WM: With your wine tours, you are continuously involved in visiting wine growers all around Europe. Are your own experiences compatible to Mondovino's conclusions?

LGS: The film offers a rare glimpse into the very highest - and lowest levels of the wine business, a world very few know anything about. Even though I'm already very involved at the top levels of the wine business in France, I found things out from this film that I hadn't realized or didn't know about.

WM: What has been striking you the most in the movie?

LGS: What really comes through in Mondovino is that wine has traditionally been a HUMAN adventure. The film is full of very human moments, and it’s precisely that part of the world of wine that attracts people the most. I very often thought during the film that those moments are what we experience on our wine tours, when we spend time with these winemakers who remain simple and human, and we have a real, human experience of pleasure in wine together for an hour or two - a TOTALLY different experience than what one has visiting a big winery in Napa, for example. It’s also part of what draws people to France – the insistence on the human aspects of life, like spending time together with friends and family, eating good food and drinking good wine as a shared experience, etc.

WM: You probably personnally know some of Mondovino's "actors". Don't you think Nossiter has sometimes put an unecessary lightspot on some aspects of the peoples charachter?

LGS: As for Michel Rolland – he’s easy to hate. Of course, he’s a brilliant enologist, but he digs his own grave in this film. He is consistently arrogant, has a huge ego, and says that if the wine is great, it’s due completely to his intervention. He’s a typical enologist: very enamored of his technical prowess, with the attitude that technique is what makes a great wine. This is quite a common view among enologists these days. As Michael Broadbent very incisively points out in the film, Rolland comes from Pomerol, home to great, huge, powerful, concentrated Merlots. Pomerol is his idea of a great wine, so he tries to make every wine into a Pomerol. Unfortunately, just planting Merlot any old place and doing micro-oxygenation in the vats or barrels does not produce a Pomerol, only a pale imitation (REALLY pale, in fact), without the terroir of Pomerol, which is really what makes Pomerol what it is. 

WM: And what about the other personalities in the film?

LGS: For the rest, it’s true that Nossiter is more kind toward Aimé Guibert and Hubert de Montille. But he also shows them with all their flaws. De Montille is not always tactful – he’s not perfect, he’s not a hero, he’s human, and he brings his humanity to the wine he produces. The fact is one can’t help but be moved by the winemakers we see in the film in the Andes or Sardinia who make wine because it’s part of the earth and because they love it for that, and then repelled by the big-money, self-interested style of the Mondavi’s or Rolland. By the way, the Mondavi’s also dig their own grave – perhaps they had other interesting things to say than what was chosen for the film, but Nossiter certainly didn’t put words in their mouth, and the words they say are pretty stupid and insensitive. Bob Parker doesn’t come off too well, either – he’s also a huge ego, and makes some comments about being proud of being American, which means he has no compunction whatsoever about saying what he has to say, even if people are ruined by it from time to time.

WM: Some say that Jonathan Nossiter's view on the wine industry is not neutral as he constantly tends to make a fool of pro-globalization contributors. 

LGS: It is obvious that Nossiter is biased – this comes through in his interviews on French TV as well. He is, however, not so much against the globilization of wine, but the fact that the wine business (like many other big agro-alimentary businesses in the world) is increasingly controlled by a small number of big-monied multi-national companies (like Mondavi), who are imposing their view of wine (a standardized product that is universally acceptable) on the entire world. 

WM: In your view, what aspects of the wine business would be missing in Mondovino?

LGS: The only thing that I felt was missing from the film (which might have made it a bit more even-handed) is the fact that many winemakers in France make BAD wine. Of course, Nossiter only interviewed famous (therefore good) winemakers in his film. There are a lot of bad things in the French wine business that need to be changed. But the attachment to the earth remains, and thank goodness – otherwise, we’ll soon have one style of red wine, and one style of white wine for the entire world, and wine will become red or white Coca Cola and lose its link to thousands of years of history and civilisation.

WM: As an American, how do you feel about the image Nossiter is giving to your fellow citizens?

LGS: Well, one of the major points in the film is when he quotes Hubert de Montille as saying : “For me, the battle isn't between Europe and the US. It is industrial wine against the culture of wine, that's the real conflict”. It’s also quite telling when Montille sourly mutters: "What pleases him (Parker) is the opposite of what pleases us. But if Parker gives a good review of a wine, the price explodes. He is a clever man and he knows what he is doing. He believes he is bringing democracy to the world of wine - just like the Americans are bringing democracy to Iraq.". That’s the way the Mondavi’s look at things as well. They’re just being good businessmen, and they don’t understand why everyone doesn’t have the same attitude. Like some of the Americans (and Australians, I should add) who take our wine tours and ask us “why would they want to LOWER yields in the French vineyards (part of the A.O.C regulations) when they could make more money by RAISING yields?”. For many Americans, making money is a religion in itself, a way of life that justifies pretty much anything and everything. I don’t want to turn this into a political forum, but I think American foreign policy is based on the same naïve idea, indicative of a young country that doesn’t have the maturity to see past its own way of doing things. Many Americans don't understand why those weird Frenchie’s insist on having good and bad vintages when they could use lots of technology (and we do love technology!) and blend grapes from God knows where to make a consistent “product” that’s good every year? There’s an expression I love that I think answers that question very well: “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”. Obviously, I very much agree here with Nossiter.

WM: Thanks for this interview, Lauriann. 

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