Review of Mondovino (2004) by Maarrk H — 25 May 2009

The Mondavis fondly recall a lunch with Kissenger; the Argentine wine growers are racists and Peronists; the old Italian families? Fascists, and admirers of Berlusconi; almost wherever there's a global wine grower/distributer, there's a picture of Reagan.

It's Walter Benjamin's crack about civilization and barbarism all over again.

Of course Mondovino's biases are mine: it loves the skeptic Burgundians, the Sardinians, the small timers, the New Yorker. It finds Robert Parker, the autodidact, an idiot savant with no sense of how he's being played by the wine corporations. The Californians, babbling about family and international wine growing, bragging about their 'funky' porcelain and their table, 'modeled after the one in The Godfather II,' are as painfully tacky as they're malignantly harmless.

My only complaint is its nostalgia. The interview at Christie's in London gestures towards exploring the international context of the wine trade in centuries past, how the English palate created Burgundian wine culture, &c. In other words, I would have trusted its distrust of technology and love of terroir had it turned its critical eye on these things, too.