THE STORY – An aspiring sommelier earning her craft under one of the greats meets a young vineyard worker who longs to become part of a world he has only admired from afar. Around them, an aristocratic winemaker defines his legacy, a legendary maître d’hôtel seeks his heir, and a reverent wine critic pursues the sublime. Devotion, desire and heritage intertwine in a portrait where the observed and the invented become inseparable.
THE CAST – Enzo Ferraroli, Céleste Kalis, Eric Goettelmann, Patrick Maniere, Guillaume Baroin & Bertrand Devillard
THE TEAM – Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw (Directors)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
“Great wine is the sum of details,” proclaims Betrand Devillard, the owner of a domaine of vineyards in the Burgundy region of France. The same could be said of a great documentary. Following their similarly culinarily-themed “The Truffle Hunters,” Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw have assembled a group of characters who are closely connected to the cultivation, harvesting, serving, tasting, and judging of one of the most famous wine regions in the world.
Each character is given a profile – often literally, as the directors do like their side views – as we follow them through a period of their lives. Betrand wants to maintain his family’s legacy even as he approaches his sunset years with an adult grandson who is reluctant to leave Paris and take over the family mantle. It’s hinted that Enzo “the boy” could serve as a potential alternative. The young man is ambitious, has a head of delicious looking hair, and drives a vintage car in keeping with Betrand’s own backwards-looking enthusiasms. But Enzo is a worker and though he is ambitious, he seems utterly unprepared for the financial gap between worker and proprietor.
Then we have those at the service end of the industry. Patrick, the perfectionist maitre’d of a three-star Michelin restaurant, doesn’t strictly speaking have much to do with the wine. Guillaume is a sommelier who, having recently divorced with his wife, is a monomaniac about wine. “I’d rather talk about wine,” he tells a date who tries to ask him about his breakup. He also tells his therapist, his hypnotherapist, and his doctor, whom he consults for the tennis elbow that has resulted from him raising a glass 100 times the night before in a marathon wine-tasting.
The overall theme seems to be that people are losing interest in tradition, the skills associated with it, and the wine that is the film’s ostensible subject. Enzo’s sometime girlfriend Céleste, for instance, is training to be a sommelier but is obviously not much cop. She enrages her teacher when she says of one exceptional cru that it’s fruity and then moves on. Enzo, after realizing that getting into the wine game as a boss is going to cost millions rather than thousands, decides to up sticks and try his hand at oyster farming instead, the lifelong ambition abandoned. The young appear to not have the drive or the knowledge of their seniors, but I couldn’t help wishing the filmmakers hadn’t chosen such obviously feckless representatives.
The film itself begins to lose interest in the latter half. Guilllaume, by dint of repetition, starts to appear more like a comic crank than an enthusiast. Worse still are the truly inexplicable diversions into a parody of a 60s love film and, at one point, “Bonnie and Clyde” (after Enzo and Céleste watch it at the cinema), as if the filmmakers are so lost they’re spinning their wheels to get to 90 minutes. The real careless moment comes when they decide to use that go-to Instagram filter which indicates Super 8 footage by showing one sprocket hole at the edge of the screen. You do know that you couldn’t actually see sprocket holes when you projected Super 8? I mean, because they were in the sprockets.
That said, the film has a lightness, a pleasant enough bouquet, and some nice property porn for those who dream about living in a mansion south of Paris as we get to wander Betrand’s villa. It’s the equivalent of a well-made coffee table book, the Taschen school of cinema. But perhaps that’s just my uneducated palate.
