DEC.05.GQ.COM.237

Jonathan Nossiter, director of

Mondovino,

drinks (andtakes aim) in Rio de Janeiro.

( Photographs by JOHN MIDGLEY )

≥

“i thought i’d

take you ﬁrst to hell,”Jonathan Nossitertells me as he opensthe door and ushersme through the gatesof Zoë, a bright,loud Americanbistro in LowerManhattan. Nossiteris a sommelier turnedﬁlmmaker—his hand-made documentary,

Mondovino,

anexamination of thee≠ects of globalizationon winemaking,caused as muchcontroversy this pastyear as the wine worldhas seen in sometime—and Zoë, hesays, is the perfectplace to get somegrounding in the badnews of the globalwine business.

›››

THEGLOBALWAR ONTERROIR

Thank God a former sommelier has taken on the winedictators and liberated us from those ridiculous ratings.At last, a man can drink for himselfby Robert Mackey

(RENEGADE)

of predicting, purelythrough chemical anal-ysis—without ever actu-ally tasting it—if a winewill get a high scorefrom these critics.Once a single taste be-comes dominant, Nossit-er says, if you care aboutpreserving the naturaldiversity of wine, “thenit’s dangerous. There is adominant Parker/

WineSpectator

taste that isunquestionably for highalcohol, fruity, very con-centrated, rich wines—the things that are easi-est to produce in Califor-nia and the New World,the easiest wines to construct. Just as ﬁlmswith simplistic plots and extravagant spe-cial e≠ects are the easiest to construct, du-plicate under di≠erent guises, and market.Just as simplistic political messages thatare easy to market become the ones thatdominate. This is all part of the same ten-dency, and it scares me. There’s no ques-tion that they are transforming the waywine is made and the way wine is under-stood, and whether they’re doing it withcomplete sincerity, marginal sincerity, orinsincerity is not even the question. I likemost of these people, and I think that mostof them at the

Spectator

—not all of them,but most of them—and Parker are funda-mentally sympathetic and sincere people.But the problem is that, in a sense, they’vebecome tools.”Perhaps sensing that he has a situationon his hands, the bartender stops by totell us “there’s no Torii Mor Pinot tonight.”“No which?” asks Nossiter. “The PinotNoir from Torii Mor.” After the bartenderhas moved out of earshot, Nossiter says,“There’s no Torii Mor Pinot. I’m pretty surethat would be the equivalent of going tothe multiplex and having them tell you,‘There’s no

Rocky 7;

there’s only

Rocky 9

and

Rocky 12

playing in the theater.’ ”Looking again at the list, he says, “It’s anall-American list, but they have Alsatianvarietals, Rhône varietals.”I ask the embarrassingly uneducatedquestion “What’s a varietal?”“It means the grape,” Nossiter says. “It’sjust a pretentious word for the grape. Thenastiest thing in the wine world to me isall the bullshit talk. Winespeak is not away for people to communicate aboutI should say right up front that I knowlittle (okay, nothing at all) about wine,and the challenge I’ve set myself is to seeif over the course of an evening talkingand drinking with Nossiter, I can actuallylearn to taste the di≠erence between thetraditionally made, artisanal wines he cel-ebrates and the high-tech, corporate wineshe attacks.The bartender hands us a gigantic winelist that proudly announces that Zoë is arecipient of a

Wine Spectator

Award of Excellence. These are ﬁghting words forNossiter. He scans the list and points toa number at the far right of the page, be-yond the year and the price of each bottle.The number is 87, the score this particularbottle received on a scale of 50 to 100, andits presence on the list is what Nossitermost hates about the way wine is sold to-day. “This is an obscenity,” Nossiter saysof the line of scores running down the list.“If wine is interesting, it’s because it is likehuman beings—it’s complex, unpredict-able, changing. It’s alive, and it evolvesover time. It is as grotesque to assign anumerical rating to determine the value of a wine as it is to assign a number to a hu-man being to determine his worth.”In

Mondovino,

Nossiter makes it clearthat he thinks a small number of Ameri-can wine critics—chieﬂy Robert Parker,who introduced the 50-to-100-point scalein his subscription-only newsletter,

The

Wine Advocate,

as well as the handful of people who write for

Wine Spectator

—haveso much power over what sells and whatdoesn’t sell that winemakers around theglobe have begun to change the way theirwines taste in an e≠ort to get higher scoresand so move more bottles.One of America’s leading wine consul-tants, Leo McCloskey, who appears brieﬂyin

Mondovino,

has even developed a way

(RENEGADE)

238.GQ.COM.DEC.05

wine; it’s a way for those people who’veacquired the jargon to intimidate otherpeople into believing they don’t have aright to talk about wine.”It turns out there’s a reason Ameri-can winespeak includes a fancy word forgrape. A key part of the marketing strategyfor American wines, Nossiter tells me, hasbeen to emphasize the grape as the mainelement in a wine, rather than the placeit grows, as in the historic French wineregions. “One of the weird things that hashappened in this country is that we hada chance to promote what has been theguiding idea in wine in every culture sincethe Bible: Wine is interesting because it’san expression of a place. This is the Frenchidea of

terroir,

which, ironically, a

WineSpectator

columnist very beautifully andaptly dubbed in English ‘somewhereness.’And it doesn’t just mean the geology andmeteorology of a speciﬁc site—that’s a partof it, of course, but

terroir

is the expressionalso of the history of that land in relationto the vine and, equally importantly, thehistory of those people who have cultivatedthat place. It’s the intersection of humanculture and agriculture. And each bottle isan expression of that intersection. There’san interaction that happens over time.Man learns the peculiarity of this soil, of that grape; it takes hundreds of years toﬁgure out what the fuck is happening. Wepromoted the idea in this country thatwine is not about

terroir,

because Ameri-can marketers knew that it was very com-plicated. Also, it doesn’t necessarily workto America’s advantage economically, inthe marketing game, because if that’s thecase, then people who have been doing itlonger—it means that they have somethingwe don’t have. So we made a calculated de-cision: We’re not going to market

terroir;

we’re going to market varietal.”The marketing of varietals, Nossitersays, is the perfect parallel to Hollywoodmovie marketing. “Grapes are actors. Theyare necessary for wine to exist, as an actoris necessary for a ﬁlm to exist. You do nothave a ﬁlm without an actor. They needyour love. They are beautifully expressivewhen they’re treated well and when theyhave a story to tell. When there is a scriptof interest, of intelligence, of complexity,that is emotional and that will move anaudience, then an actor has a chance to ex-press himself. The same thing with a grape.The Pinot Noir grape has now become therage. The funny thing is that switchingfrom Merlot to Pinot Noir is like deciding

Nossiter with his wife, twins, and faithfuldog outside his home in Rio.

“The Napa powers that be are doing their bestto discredit me. Saying it’s a French documentaryis like saying I’m a Communist.”

(RENEGADE)

LARRY STONE,

WINEDIRECTOR, RUBICON,SAN FRANCISCO

“I wish that hewould have been ableto portray the peoplethat he interviewedin all their complexity,rather than trying to reduce them allto stick figures thatwere either heroes orvillains. None of thosepeople are villains,and very few of themare heroes. They’re allpeople who love wine,and they’re doing what they think is bestfor it.”

240.GQ.COM.DEC.05

EBERTS OF THE WINE WORLD

independent film with a simplistic story;this is a Hollywood big-budget film withspecial e≠ects, but it’s the same simplisticstory. They’re both saccharine. They bothhave completely fake happy endings thatleave you happy like cocaine leaves youhappy, for about fifteen minutes, and thenyou feel like shit.”

***

this kind of

blunt assessment of theﬂaws in their very high-priced product isnot something that corporate wine pro-ducers, and the people who make a liv-ing praising their products, were exactlythrilled to hear when

Mondovino

came outand started to resonate with audiences. Sothey fought back, mainly by trying to pinthe Michael Moore label on Nossiter, dis-missing his ﬁlm as a clumsy polemic, the

Fahrenheit 9/11

of the wine world, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, class warfare, andof course, “French.”Because Nossiter grew up partly inEurope, and because

Mondovino

openedfirst in France—where it was a big hit—hemay have overlooked how easy it wouldbe for some American critics to see thefilm’s antiglobalization message as anti-Americanism. While it is true that the arti-sanal winemakers who appear in the filmdefending tradition and quality and indi-viduality are not from California but fromBurgundy, Sardinia, Argentina, and Brazil,it is also true that several of the winemak-ers and wealthy executives who seem themost eager to sell out are not Americanbut French and Italian. Plus, the real heroof the film is a native New Yorker, wineimporter Neal Rosenthal, who lays out thestruggle for the soul of the wine world bysaying, “There’s a battle between the re-sistance and the collaborators. It doesn’tmean traditionalists versus the modern-ists, because you can be modern and stillpreserve tradition.”It is Rosenthal whose name Nossitermentions when I ask him what the leastinformed among us can do to start toeducate ourselves. The first, most basictip, he says, is to turn the bottle aroundin the store and look at the label on theback—that’s generally where the nameof the wine importer is. Good importerswork like gallery owners or indie recordlabels; they visit wineries and taste in cel-lars and try to find wines that are made by“resistants” who refuse to sell out. “That’sa shortcut,” he says. “There are twenty orthirty great American wine importers.Learn Neal Rosenthal, Terry Theise, Rob-ert Chadderdon, Michael Skurnik, KermitLynch. Then you can just look for theirnames. It doesn’t mean you’ll always lovethe wine, but at least you know the guy wasout selecting some really interesting stu≠.”As we get ready to leave Zoë, the bar-tender—who Nossiter tried to draw intoour conversation earlier by asking him totaste the Chardonnay, but who, seeing thatI was recording the conversation, wouldonly say, straight into the microphone, “Ilove the Joseph Phelps Chardonnay; it’sthe best Chardonnay I’ve ever tasted”—asks us what we’re up to. Nossiter tells himthat I’m writing an article about wine, andthe bartender asks us if we’ve heard thatthere’s “a sort of controversial French doc-umentary out about wine.”Nossiter smiles. “It’s actually American.”As we step back out onto the street, Nos-siter says, “That is not accidental, that it’smisunderstood as a French documentary.Because people—the

Wine Spectator

andthe Napa powers that be—are doing theirlevel best to discredit me. You know, bysaying it’s a French documentary, it’s likesaying I’m a Communist, right, during theMcCarthy era. It’s a witch hunt. It’s un-fucking-believable.”What makes it even harder to fuckingbelieve is that the European powers thatbe—embarrassed by the things Nossitercaught them saying on ﬁlm—have tried toexplain it all away as the work of a typical-ly rude, ill-bred American. Michel Rolland,the globe-trotting French wine consultantwho was infuriated by the slice of his lifeshown in the documentary—he’s seenrushing from vineyard to vineyard, tellingwinemakers how to technically manipu-late their wines—attacked Nossiter in theBritish press as an ignorant American who“must have grown up, like so many Ameri-cans, surrounded by Coca-Cola, hamburg-ers, and

The Muppet Show,

which producesa very particular kind of culture.”

COURTESY OF THINKFILM

Matthew Modine is no longer a star: Wedon’t want to market him; let’s market TomCruise. It’s arbitrary. Either actor is poten-tially interesting, but if they are given onlystar vehicles with stupid scripts and no di-rector, then it’s pointless. The grape is thereto tell the story of the

terroir.

”To make his point, Nossiter orders twodi≠erent Chardonnays. The marketingof the Chardonnay varietal in the 1980s,he says, was one of the most successfulmoves of the American wine industry.When the wine arrives, we try the JosephPhelps Chardonnay ﬁrst. It’s a superb ex-ample, Nossiter says, of the kind of sweet,extremely high-alcohol wine now pro-duced by many California “studio” winer-ies. “This is an alcoholic, liquid versionof candy. You know what this goes with?McDonald’s. Why does McDonald’s work?Fat, salt, and sugar, right? This is elemen-tal. Neanderthals, for sustenance and sur-vival, needed fat, they needed salt, andthey needed sugar. McDonald’s is Nean-derthal food; this is Neanderthal wine.”The other bottle comes from a smallwinery on the North Fork of Long Island,and although I expect it to be much sub-tler and complex, it tastes pretty much thesame. It turns out Nossiter hates it, too.“Being small is no guarantee of anything,”he says. Some big producers still makewine in traditional, individual, expres-sive ways, and some small producers aregeared primarily toward the market—theway many independent ﬁlms are just asmuch about making money as any block-buster. “This is a high-end Chardonnay;this is a lower-end Chardonnay. This is an

Unlike lawyers or doctors or kids with satanic powers, wineexperts don’t see their world represented on the big screenvery often.

called a handful of America’s wine authoritiesto get their response to Jonathan Nossiter’s film.

ROBERT BOHR,

WINEDIRECTOR, CRU, NEWYORK CITY

“I loved it.Granted, he madea remarkably bluntpoint, but that doesn’tmean it’s invalid. Ifyou respect traditionand

terroir,

ultimatelyyou produce a betterproduct than ifyou are producing wine like you wouldproduce any otherwidget. That, sadly,is what is happening,and his point, inmy estimation, isabsolutely correct.”

JOE BASTIANICH,

CO-OWNER,RESTAURANTS BABBO,OTTO, AND LUPA, ANDSTORE ITALIAN WINEMERCHANTS, NEWYORK CITY

“I thought it waskind of ridiculous.It wasn’t responsiblejournalism. He wasjust getting his agendaacross. It wasn’teven journalism; itwas fiction.”

LEO M

CLOSKEY,

COFOUNDER, ENOLOGIX,SONOMA, CALIFORNIA

“I knew thatNossiter would stirup a hornet’s nest,because the wineindustry has nogadflies willing tocomment on the winemedia itself. They feelthey will be punished.That causes a cultureof cover-up in theindustry, and he puthis finger on it. Thefilm broke a pact thatexisted betweenthe wine producersand the wine press.”