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* Jonathan Nossiter, director of Mondovino, drinks (and takes aim) in Rio de Janeiro.

( P h o t o g r a p h s b y J O H N M I D G L E Y )

≥“i thought i’d take you first to hell,” Jonathan Nossiter tells me as he opens the door and ushers me through the gates of Zoë, a bright, loud American bistro in Lower Manhattan. Nossiter is a sommelier turned filmmaker—his hand-made documentary, Mondovino, an examination of the e≠ects of globalization on winemaking, caused as much controversy this past year as the wine world has seen in some time—and Zoë, he says, is the perfect place to get some grounding in the bad news of the global wine business. ›››

THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROIR

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

*(RENEGADE)

of predicting, purely through chemical anal-ysis—without ever actu-ally tasting it—if a wine will get a high score from these critics.

Once a single taste be-comes dominant, Nossit-er says, if you care about preserving the natural diversity of wine, “then it’s dangerous. There is a dominant Parker/Wine Spectator taste that is unquestionably for high alcohol, 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 films with 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 that are easy to market become the ones that dominate. This is all part of the same ten-dency, and it scares me. There’s no ques-tion that they are transforming the way wine is made and the way wine is under-stood, and whether they’re doing it with complete sincerity, marginal sincerity, or insincerity is not even the question. I like most of these people, and I think that most of 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’ve become tools.”

Perhaps sensing that he has a situation on his hands, the bartender stops by to tell us “there’s no Torii Mor Pinot tonight.” “No which?” asks Nossiter. “The Pinot Noir from Torii Mor.” After the bartender has moved out of earshot, Nossiter says, “There’s no Torii Mor Pinot. I’m pretty sure that would be the equivalent of going to the 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 an all-American list, but they have Alsatian varietals, Rhône varietals.”

I ask the embarrassingly uneducated question “What’s a varietal?”

“It means the grape,” Nossiter says. “It’s just a pretentious word for the grape. The nastiest thing in the wine world to me is all the bullshit talk. Winespeak is not a way for people to communicate about

I should say right up front that I know little (okay, nothing at all) about wine, and the challenge I’ve set myself is to see if over the course of an evening talking and drinking with Nossiter, I can actually learn to taste the di≠erence between the traditionally made, artisanal wines he cel-ebrates and the high-tech, corporate wines he attacks.

The bartender hands us a gigantic wine list that proudly announces that Zoë is a recipient of a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. These are fighting words for Nossiter. He scans the list and points to a 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 particular bottle received on a scale of 50 to 100, and its presence on the list is what Nossiter most hates about the way wine is sold to-day. “This is an obscenity,” Nossiter says of the line of scores running down the list. “If wine is interesting, it’s because it is like human beings—it’s complex, unpredict-able, changing. It’s alive, and it evolves over time. It is as grotesque to assign a numerical 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 clear that he thinks a small number of Ameri-can wine critics—chiefly Robert Parker, who introduced the 50-to-100-point scale in his subscription-only newsletter, The Wine Advocate, as well as the handful of people who write for Wine Spectator—have so much power over what sells and what doesn’t sell that winemakers around the globe have begun to change the way their wines taste in an e≠ort to get higher scores and so move more bottles.

One of America’s leading wine consul-tants, Leo McCloskey, who appears briefly in Mondovino, has even developed a way

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wine; it’s a way for those people who’ve acquired the jargon to intimidate other people into believing they don’t have a right to talk about wine.”

It turns out there’s a reason Ameri-can winespeak includes a fancy word for grape. A key part of the marketing strategy for American wines, Nossiter tells me, has been to emphasize the grape as the main element in a wine, rather than the place it grows, as in the historic French wine regions. “One of the weird things that has happened in this country is that we had a chance to promote what has been the guiding idea in wine in every culture since the Bible: Wine is interesting because it’s an expression of a place. This is the French idea of terroir, which, ironically, a Wine Spectator columnist very beautifully and aptly dubbed in English ‘somewhereness.’

And it doesn’t just mean the geology and meteorology of a specific site—that’s a part of it, of course, but terroir is the expression also of the history of that land in relation to the vine and, equally importantly, the history of those people who have cultivated that place. It’s the intersection of human culture and agriculture. And each bottle is an expression of that intersection. There’s an interaction that happens over time. Man learns the peculiarity of this soil, of that grape; it takes hundreds of years to figure out what the fuck is happening. We promoted the idea in this country that wine is not about terroir, because Ameri-can marketers knew that it was very com-plicated. Also, it doesn’t necessarily work to America’s advantage economically, in the marketing game, because if that’s the case, then people who have been doing it longer—it means that they have something we 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, Nossiter says, is the perfect parallel to Hollywood movie marketing. “Grapes are actors. They are necessary for wine to exist, as an actor is necessary for a film to exist. You do not have a film without an actor. They need your love. They are beautifully expressive when they’re treated well and when they have a story to tell. When there is a script of interest, of intelligence, of complexity, that is emotional and that will move an audience, then an actor has a chance to ex-press himself. The same thing with a grape. The Pinot Noir grape has now become the rage. The funny thing is that switching from Merlot to Pinot Noir is like deciding

* Nossiter with his wife, twins, and faithful dog outside his home in Rio. “The Napa powers that be are doing their best

to discredit me. Saying it’s a French documentary is like saying I’m a Communist.”

(RENEGADE)

LARRY STONE, WINE DIRECTOR, RUBICON, SAN FRANCISCO

“I wish that he would have been able to portray the people that he interviewed in all their complexity, rather than trying to reduce them all to stick figures that were either heroes or villains. None of those people are villains, and very few of them are heroes. They’re all people who love wine, and they’re doing what they think is best for it.”

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EBERTS OF THE WINE WORLD*

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

* * *this kind of blunt assessment of the flaws in their very high-priced product is not something that corporate wine pro-ducers, and the people who make a liv-ing praising their products, were exactly thrilled to hear when Mondovino came out and started to resonate with audiences. So they fought back, mainly by trying to pin the 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, and of course, “French.”

Because Nossiter grew up partly in Europe, and because Mondovino opened first in France—where it was a big hit—he may have overlooked how easy it would be for some American critics to see the film’s antiglobalization message as anti- Americanism. While it is true that the arti-sanal winemakers who appear in the film defending tradition and quality and indi-viduality are not from California but from Burgundy, Sardinia, Argentina, and Brazil, it is also true that several of the winemak-ers and wealthy executives who seem the most eager to sell out are not American but French and Italian. Plus, the real hero of the film is a native New Yorker, wine

importer Neal Rosenthal, who lays out the struggle for the soul of the wine world by saying, “There’s a battle between the re-sistance and the collaborators. It doesn’t mean traditionalists versus the modern-ists, because you can be modern and still preserve tradition.”

It is Rosenthal whose name Nossiter mentions when I ask him what the least informed among us can do to start to educate ourselves. The first, most basic tip, he says, is to turn the bottle around in the store and look at the label on the back—that’s generally where the name of the wine importer is. Good importers work like gallery owners or indie record labels; they visit wineries and taste in cel-lars and try to find wines that are made by “resistants” who refuse to sell out. “That’s a shortcut,” he says. “There are twenty or thirty great American wine importers. Learn Neal Rosenthal, Terry Theise, Rob-ert Chadderdon, Michael Skurnik, Kermit Lynch. Then you can just look for their names. It doesn’t mean you’ll always love the wine, but at least you know the guy was out selecting some really interesting stu≠.”

As we get ready to leave Zoë, the bar-tender—who Nossiter tried to draw into our conversation earlier by asking him to taste the Chardonnay, but who, seeing that I was recording the conversation, would only say, straight into the microphone, “I love the Joseph Phelps Chardonnay; it’s the best Chardonnay I’ve ever tasted”—asks us what we’re up to. Nossiter tells him that I’m writing an article about wine, and the bartender asks us if we’ve heard that there’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’s misunderstood as a French documentary. Because people—the Wine Spectator and the Napa powers that be—are doing their level best to discredit me. You know, by saying it’s a French documentary, it’s like saying I’m a Communist, right, during the McCarthy era. It’s a witch hunt. It’s un-fucking-believable.”

What makes it even harder to fucking believe is that the European powers that be—embarrassed by the things Nossiter caught them saying on film—have tried to explain it all away as the work of a typical-ly rude, ill-bred American. Michel Rolland, the globe-trotting French wine consultant who was infuriated by the slice of his life shown in the documentary—he’s seen rushing from vineyard to vineyard, telling winemakers how to technically manipu-late their wines—attacked Nossiter in the British 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 produces a very particular kind of culture.” C

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

To make his point, Nossiter orders two di≠erent Chardonnays. The marketing of the Chardonnay varietal in the 1980s, he says, was one of the most successful moves of the American wine industry. When the wine arrives, we try the Joseph Phelps 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 version of 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, and they needed sugar. McDonald’s is Nean-derthal food; this is Neanderthal wine.”

The other bottle comes from a small winery on the North Fork of Long Island, and although I expect it to be much sub-tler and complex, it tastes pretty much the same. It turns out Nossiter hates it, too. “Being small is no guarantee of anything,” he says. Some big producers still make wine in traditional, individual, expres-sive ways, and some small producers are geared primarily toward the market—the way many independent films are just as much 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, wine experts don’t see their world represented on the big screen very often. GQ called a handful of America’s wine authorities to get their response to Jonathan Nossiter ’s film.

ROBERT BOHR, WINE DIRECTOR, CRU, NEW YORK CITY

“I loved it. Granted, he made a remarkably blunt point, but that doesn’t mean it’s invalid. If you respect tradition and terroir, ultimately you produce a better product than if you are producing wine like you would produce any other widget. That, sadly, is what is happening, and his point, in my estimation, is absolutely correct.”

JOE BASTIANICH, CO-OWNER, RESTAURANTS BABBO, OTTO, AND LUPA, AND STORE ITALIAN WINE MERCHANTS, NEW YORK CITY

“I thought it was kind of ridiculous. It wasn’t responsible journalism. He was just getting his agenda across. It wasn’t even journalism; it was fiction.”

LEO MCCLOSKEY, COFOUNDER, ENOLOGIX, SONOMA, CALIFORNIA

“I knew that Nossiter would stir up a hornet’s nest, because the wine industry has no gadflies willing to comment on the wine media itself. They feel they will be punished. That causes a culture of cover-up in the industry, and he put his finger on it. The film broke a pact that existed between the wine producers and the wine press.” —JORDAN REED

In fact, the son of an American foreign correspondent, Nossiter, who is now 44, grew up in Paris, Florence, New Delhi, Athens, and London, absorbing Ameri-can culture from afar and surrounded by wine as much as anything else. If you’re an American raised in Europe who’s try-ing to defend the idea of cultural diversity against the onslaught of corporate mono-culture and you’re attacked by the Ameri-cans for being French and by the French for being American, it sounds like you’re doing something right.

* * *having lived as a child in the ’60s in a house in Paris that was once occupied by a French Fascist who committed sui-cide there during the war, Nossiter thinks more about the habits of mind—and mind control—that made Fascist states possible than most Americans his age do. One of the elements of his film that seemed sur-prising to many American critics (chiefly wine-world insiders like Pierre-Antoine Rovani, a French-American critic who works for Robert Parker’s newsletter) is that the subject of collaboration—which winemakers collaborated with and still excuse those Fascist regimes and which did not—came up during his interviews. In an attack on the film, Rovani wrote that it was unfair that Nossiter kept in an embarrassing admission by a young member of an old Florentine wine fam-ily, the Antinoris, that yes, her family had supported Fascism, but it was okay be-cause Mussolini did a lot of good for Italy (a statement, Rovani wrote, that happens to be entirely accurate).

Like most of the criticism of the film in the American wine press, Rovani’s re-sponse to the film sends Nossiter o≠. “Hey, I wasn’t balanced and fair about Musso-lini!” he says. “Oh shit! I wasn’t balanced and fair about a Fascist! This is the world we live in.”

Although in some ways it seems like an argument over the past, Nossiter says he sees the spread of corporate-dominated globalization as a present-day form of Fas-cism. “There is no question that branding and marketing are the Fascisms of our time. They’re much subtler in their corro-sive e≠ect on society, which only makes it harder for us to resist today.”

The extent of the battle became most clear to him, he tells me, when during filming, a marketing executive for a glob-al liquor giant leveled with him about the key part ignorance plays in controlling consumer behavior.

The executive told Nossiter, “Wine is a problem for us. We’ve discovered that the more wine consumers become educated, the less brand-loyal they get. This is a problem for us because our profitability, our value as a company, is based on brand

loyalty. Therefore, it’s in our own best in-terest to discourage people from becoming educated.” In other words, Nossiter says, the corporate winemakers’ goal is “to keep Americans ignorant, just like Fox News is cynically designed to keep us ignorant.”

* * *by the time we escaped Zoë, I was start-ing to feel that it might be just too hard to fight back against all this, and I asked Nossiter if he ever felt the forces were in-exorable and that someday he’d have to accept the idea of drinking what he calls “dumb” wine. In reply he told me that I needed a taste of the good news about the wine business, and he took me to a Fili-pino restaurant called Cendrillon, where we could “drink something that will nour-ish us.” A few minutes later, as we sat in a booth and sampled one of the reds Neal Rosenthal had discovered in the South of France and shipped back to New York, Nossiter pointed out that there is a bright side to global commerce. Since the wine trade is not—at least not yet—completely controlled by corporations, although there is much more bad stu≠ out there than ever before, there is also more good, often less expensive but more tasty stu≠, too.

“I was just in Italy, in Sardinia,” Nos-siter says over a remarkable dinner pre-pared by Cendrillon’s owner and chef, Romy Dorotan. “This artisanal winemaker featured in the film, Battista Columbu, he and his wife said that they never imagined they would see themselves on film, from the little town of Bosa. There were about 150 people in the local movie theater, and it was beautiful. They said the most amaz-ing thing for them watching the film was to realize they weren’t alone. You know, I’ve heard this pretty much everywhere I’ve gone—that we are not alone.”

Dorotan and Nossiter are old friends from the days when Nossiter was buying wine for Balthazar, around the corner, and now Dorotan comes out with a bottle not on his list for us to try. It’s a Bandol that Dorotan is thinking about adding.

I’ve spent much of the evening listen-ing to Nossiter talk about how American drinkers have become so completely inse-cure about their ability to taste wine, how we’ve become trained to obsessively follow scores handed out by critics, that when he asks me to compare this Bandol to another we’ve been drinking with dinner, I feel simultaneously empowered and paralyzed. Reluctantly, I venture an opinion—that I like the first bottle better?—and Nossiter indicates neither agreement nor rejection, leaving me out there on a limb, wondering what about the taste made me say that. An hour and two grappas later, he tells me this is all he’s trying to do, to urge people to make up their own minds. “It’s very tough for the consumer to figure out what

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the fuck the truth is about wine,” he says. “You have one option, which is drink and think, drink and think.” What a notion. Throw all the books and magazines and ratings away. Drink for yourself.

robert mackey is a writer and filmmaker living in New York.

° What ever happened to the days when a Corn Belt conservative could trash the idea of sending our boys off to war in some distant, benighted land and still get invited to the company picnic? Chuck Hagel, Republican senator from Nebraska, would like to know. After nine years in the Senate, Hagel is entering his sixth month, give or take, as a certified “maverick,” that rare breed of politician who is not afraid to call bullshit on his own party.

Hagel is proudly conservative. He has one of the redder voting records on Capitol Hill, supporting small government, free trade, privatized Social Security, the right to life. But he still wants to keep the ice caps frozen and protect Gitmo prisoners; and more than anything, he wants the executive branch to stop spouting garbage like “the insurgency is in its last throes,” as Dick Cheney does from time to time, and to form a coherent Iraq policy. He has said, “Bottom line is this: Our policy must be worthy of the young men and women we are sending out there.”

“The White House is completely disconnected from reality,” Hagel told U.S. News in June. “It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.”

Hagel thinks we can win, and that we must win. He isn’t joining Cindy Sheehan’s Troops Out Now! drum circle. But there’s still shrapnel in his chest from Vietnam, and he knows the personal costs of foreign policy. “When we think of war, [we] think in abstractions,” he says. “But we too often let the humanness of war and the consequences of that slip by.”

He is frequently accused of disloyalty. “I don’t apologize for questioning,” he says. Hagel may never get to clear brush with President Bush in Crawford, and his recent rebelliousness probably won’t help him in the 2008 Republican primaries, but in this time of slavish partisanship, it’s invigorating to watch a man speak his mind and take his licks, no matter which party line he’s crossing.—TRENT MACNAMARA

Party CrasherIn which a Republican senator has the balls to differ with the president on Iraq

MEN OF THE YEARGREAT PERFORMANCES / 06 .05