Critique of pure riesling: wine snobbery in an age of globalization.

• Author: Howley, Kerry
• Position: Mondovino - Movie Review

Almost 30 years ago, nine French critics gathered in Paris to preside over a face-off of French and American wines. Chardonnays battled with white Burgundies; Cabernets sought to displace Bordeaux. The French had always said line wine was primarily a function of place--and that place was France. But following the blind tasting, the critics found they had chosen a Californian Cabernet as the top red and placed three Napa Valley whites within the top four. As he downed a 1972 Napa Chardonnay, one critic reportedly gushed, "Ah, back to France."

These men ushered an identity crisis into the world of wine, an Americanization and eventual globalization that has yet to abate. That crisis and its fallout are explored at length in Mondovino, a documentary that debuted last year at Cannes, became a surprise hit in France, and is now touring the United States. Jonathan Nossiter's film, which spans Napa Valley, Bordeaux, Tuscany, and Monkton, Maryland, among other places, is a sympathetic portrayal of European winemakers struggling to hold their own among the avatars of globalization.

Nossiter offers Aime Guibert, a cantankerous and eminently likable French vintner, as a force against those conspiring to put a box of California Merlot on every table in America.

"Let's be clear; wine is dead," Guibert declares amidst a damp row of vines. A hero of wine-antiglobalists, Guibert led the resistance against winemaker Robert Mondavi, the Napa Valley giant, when they sought to move into Aniane, Languedoc. Like the other old world winemakers Nossiter interviews, Guibert is a Millet masterpiece come to life, a wrinkled, aggressively authentic farmer railing against capitalism as he sweeps through his vineyard.

"It takes a poet to make a great wine," he says, clearly confident that he is that poet.

Against this bucolic decay, Nossiter posits the obscenely successful Michel Rolland, a wine consultant and a crass, comic-book villain. He appears in a sterile office and a chauffered car, making cracks about journalists into his cell phone, denouncing the anti-globalization "peasants" from behind a glass desk, lording over a map that marks the places his business has penetrated. To Rolland, the wine racket is a high-stakes round of Risk. It's not poetry; it's conquest.

Rolland consults for men like Mondavi, the world's most powerful winemaker and a symbol of Napa's ascendance. Filmed in their Italianate mansion, flanked by tour groups, Mondavi and his sons shrug off...