Couched among other, more precious ideas, Jonathan Nossiter's last feature, Signs & Wonders, contained a screed on globalization, turning on the provocative thesis that nobody could fall in love at a McDonald's. Why? Nossiter implies that such special moments have a unique, sensual distinction that the McDonald's environment—antiseptic, impersonal, and utterly reproducible—forbids by nature. And the more space is gobbled up by these corporate entities, the less human we become. That message goes from subtext to text in Mondovino, Nossiter's sprawling political essay about the wine business, which he feels is victimized by a movement toward homogeneity on a global scale. Over the course of 135 minutes, his argument certainly gets all the defense it needs, but it's possible to come away from the movie persuaded yet thoroughly irritated, both by Mondovino's long-windedness and by Nossiter's unambiguous attitude toward the major players.
While he falls just short of dressing them in white and black cowboy hats, Nossiter neatly divides his subjects into two camps: The dying breed of avuncular growers and importers who believe that truly unique wine has become an endangered species, and the corporate raiders and noxious consultants who are snapping up vineyards and manipulating the wines until they all taste the same. The chief villains in this story are the Mondavis of Napa Valley, who are seizing every hectare of soil they can buy; Michel Rolland, an influential consultant who encourages seemingly every client to "micro-oxygenate"; and dominant tastemakers like critic Robert Parker and the folks at Wine Spectator magazine. Nossiter's heroes are stubborn purists like Aime Guibert, who famously thwarted the Mondavis' efforts to open a winery in the Languedoc by convincing the small town of Aniane to elect a Communist mayor.
Though Nossiter operates without narration or title cards—which might have provided some much-needed shape and context—his presence behind (and, to some extent, in front of) the camera isn't forgotten for a second. He indulges his favorites with the time to wax philosophical about the historic centrality of wine in families, communities, and civilized societies, while needling his foes with insert shots of immigrant laborers or pictures of the Reagans mounted on a CEO's wall. And yet Mondovino, for all its pervasive irritations and lack of discipline, succeeds in using below-the-belt tactics to get its message across, especially for those unschooled in the rarified world of oenophilia. At the heart of Nossiter's argument is the concept of terroir, which refers to the sense of place in which a given wine is made, which is critical in identifying that wine with a certain region. Take away the terroir, and wines from Tuscany start tasting like the ones from the California coast. Even for palates that can barely register the difference between a '78 Montrachet and a vintage bottle of paint remover, there's reason to care about the world losing its precious distinctions, and Nossiter provides a call to arms.