Jonathan Nossiter pt. 3, Wine, Power, Portugal
Ξ September 29th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
I am very pleased to present the third and concluding part of my sterling interview with writer/film-maker Jonathan Nossiter. The immediate occasion of the talk was the October 13th release of his extraordinary book, Liquid Memory, as well November’s release of his 10 part documentary, Mondovino, the Complete Series. I’ve interviewed many people but perhaps no-one more singularly engaged with both the cultural meaning of wine and the with deepening of our understanding. Of course, wine cannot be understood in a conventional sense. It is an ongoing, perpetually renewed encounter. And the greater part of the work or spiritual exercise, pun intended, is to be performed by us, by our subjectivity open to difference. In other words, it is dialectical. This is why Mr. Nossiter’s discourse on wine shares many themes and concepts with other arts, with Cinema, Literature and Painting, for example. Like them, wine, too, can be an art-form subject to new approaches and new evaluations through time. Wine lives, both practically and ideationally. It is movement, music, and dance. It is Liquid Memory.
Great thanks to Mr. Nossiter for his participation in this effort. He took valuable time away from editing his latest film, Rio Sex Comedy, to answer my many post-interview questions and requests for clarification.
A final personal note. It has been my a abiding thought since the founding of this blog that one day I might interview Mr. Nossiter. It is not too much to say that it has been a key motivation to write Reign of Terroir. So when he picked up the phone in Rio the pleasure was, well, something I shall always remember. I therefore dedicate this last portion of the interview to the many wine bloggers out there fighting the good fight, working to make thoughtful contributions to the complex discourse on wine. Marchons, marchons!.
Part 1
Part 2
Admin How was the reception of Mondovino when released, especially in the United States?
Jonathan Nossiter One of the scariest things that happened with Mondovino was when it was released in the US. I have never in my life seen so much personal vitriol. I’m accustomed as a film director to all kinds of reviews, but they’ve always dealt with the work. And so, of course, I’ve never responded to any of them, either the good or the bad. But Mondovino elicited personal attacks that floored me. And one of the most absolutely insane expressions, a moment of pure Bushian mania, was the outburst on Robert Parker’s website. There were hundreds of pages of absolutely staggering ad hominem attacks; gratuitous, uninformed, contradictory and hugely inflammatory (the vast majority from people who’d never even seen any of my films, including Mondovino, but once urged on by Parker’s former attack dog, Rovani, they barked and nipped with frothing, rabid fury). I tried to respond but was overwhelmed by the level of rage and willful, gleeful ignorance. In retrospect, it’s comic. I was called both a left wing fanatic and a Nazi sympathizer.
Mind you, it wasn’t everyone on the board. I was also happy to see a number of brave souls (laughs) who tried, even if they did not particularly like Mondovino, to defend the notion of respect and a minimal level of civility.
But it was pretty shocking. I am interested to see that that board seems to be imploding. There are more and more threads that have apparently been shut down. There’s been a big scandal with Parker’s collaborators accepting paid trips from wineries that they subsequently reviewed. And lots of people have abandoned the board because it’s basically been censored like a kind of Stalinist propaganda arm by its administrator, that uproarious Dickensian character Mark Squires, already a figure of fun in Portugal where, to their consternation, he’s been assigned by the grand Poobah, despite not speaking Portuguese or knowing the culture. It seems that threads on the Squires/Parker board were being censored, with certain people with dissenting ideological views censored or even kicked off the boards. Ignorance and vitriol will in the end often self-implode. I was also told that one of their regular (non-censored!) posters recently issued a death threat to me. The hangover from Bush-Cheney hasn’t disappeared, alas.
Have you heard of the WineBerserkers site? It was founded in part, it’s said, by folks either fed up with or bounced from the Parker board.
JN Is that right? I’ll have to look it up.
I can’t imagine the reception when your book comes out here. Of course, there was some push back from Parker when the French edition appeared.
JN He hadn’t even read the book and he called me a leader of ‘the wine gestapo’. A nice touch from a non-Jew addressing a Jew. And further evidence, if he goes after a small-fry like me, that his power (and whatever reason he ever had) are in steep decline.
How does the English edition differ from the French?
JN The English edition is much shorter. I worked with a great editor at FSG, Courtney Hodell, who kicked (with grace) my ass; and she was right. I’ve never written a book before and I’ll probably never write one again; I’m a filmmaker, not a writer. I got a kind of master class from her about writing with more precision and purpose. So I was able to weed out a lot of stuff that was repetitious and hone clearer ideas with an English language readership in mind. About a third of the chapters in the French edition are not in the American edition and it has been substantially reimagined. And thanks to Courtney and my Brazilian editor Luiz Schwarcz, hugely improved.
I’m much happier with the American (and just released Brazilian) version of the book because it’s a book intended for a much larger audience. I don’t mean in terms of numbers, but in terms of breadth. I hope it will be of interest to people who already like wine, who like to think about wine, but it’s also intended to try and open up a cultural debate about wine for people who didn’t think that wine matters.
It’s an absolutely extraordinary book. It’s provocative in the sense that you are constantly thrown outside of yourself, your comfort zone. You really do have to think a great deal about your relationship to wine. The richness of it’s ideas… just when you think it’s all been said, it’s all been written, along comes your book.
JN Thank you. It’s nice to hear that. That’s the beautiful thing about wine. That’s what wine does. It forces me -forces all of us- to rethink all kinds of things constantly. Which is why these new movements like the ‘natural winemakers’ are so exciting because they’re challenging me as a wine drinker; and I know they’re challenging other winemakers to rethink what they thought was the right way to make wine.
I think that wine is the greatest stimulant for making us rethink questions of taste and identity, of our own and of others.
The book is a powerful defense of ‘otherness’ and the necessity of entering into that dialogue.
JN That seems to be one of the critical things about wine. That’s why I felt it was mad that in the US after Mondovino I was labeled as a kind of fanatic. The point about wine, it seems to me, is that the element of subjectivity is so huge, it’s so determining, that when we think that we’re certain, we’re denying what wine is, which is why mathematical scores are an abomination. Wine is vital, living, polymorphous, and constantly changing.
To me the beauty of wine is the fact that you cannot grab onto it and define it absolutely. I’ve stopped going to professional tastings. I cannot stand it anymore. For me, whether sit-down or stand-up, vertical, horizontal or abdominal, those pucker-faced tastings -like a Miss World contest- strip all of the pleasure and beauty -and most of the meaning- from wine.
A single bottle of wine, even of the most marginal value, you need to get to know it, like you need to get to know a bloody person. You need to spend at least an hour with it. You need to see it evolve from the time you open it, from the time that it itself opens, to how your palate changes, to how the atmosphere changes. How can you possibly have a sense of what the wine is in front of you by tasting 50 wines (if not more) in the space of an hour, spending at most only a minute or two in front of each, as many critics do? This is madness to me. Madness. And it has become the predominant method for wine critics all over the world. And then imagine that after that most superficial of contacts with a wine, a mathematical value is attributed to the wine’s value and quality! Lewis Carroll is alive and well.
Wine is a living, breathing entity. That’s the beauty of it. It is fully alive. And that means it is fully changeable, and our perception of it is too.
I think you know that this is not a relativist or fatuous postmodernist discourse. It doesn’t mean that everything is subjective and that whatever you like is great and that we’re all equal. Obviously the book tries to examine the tension between what is infinitely subjective and what is verifiable, or what is at least concrete. What is concrete in wine is the earth, the roots that go into that earth, the vine itself that produces the grape, the crushing of the grape. There are undeniably objective elements to wine, much more objective than in movie-making or literature, or other arts. So that we’re not just talking about bullshit and air.
At the same time, I think it is more profoundly subjective than even our subjective understanding or perception of many other works of art.
I hope the book is an invitation for each one of us to reconsider in our own way, on our own terms, what the tension is between that subjectivity, our subjectivity, and the things which are concrete. The more we’re aware of our own subjectivity, the more we try to understand ourselves, the more free we are.
What is additionally true in wine is a vineyard that has been continuously planted for several hundred years, or a thousand years, with an evolving clone of the same grape or with different grapes. And the history of man’s relationship to that. These are real things. That’s why I was horrified during the release of Mondovino in the US: the arguments were often flipped on their heads! The idea that terroir can be dismissed as European marketing, or worse, that terroir is anywhere you want it to be.
I hope the book is an invitation to rethink things on their own terms, obviously in a dialogue with my propositions, with things I’ve tried to show. I’ve tried to offer up my own subjectivity in as naked and transparent a way as possible. I lay my cards on the table. And I invite the reader to reconsider his subjectivity; and to reconsider mine as well!
The reign of terror also includes the emerging power of critics in the last twenty or thirty years and how they’ve distorted the wine landscape, in my opinion. The book is very much a call to the reader to question and consider the role of so-called wine authorities who are not winemakers, and a plea to listen to the words of the often hugely learned and articulate winemakers themselves.
And the 10 hour, 4 DVD set of Mondovino will simultaneously be released.
JN Yes, that’s right. That’s a coincidence. I’m happy about that. Particularly for wine lovers, the 10 part series, to be released in November by KimStim, is much, much more interesting than the feature film. It really goes into much, much more detail with winemakers themselves and with wine itself. Mondovino as a film is not really about wine. Wine is the MacGuffin of Mondovino. It’s only marginally about wine. It’s about a lot of other things.
The 10 part series is much more about wine itself and deals in depth with characters like Aubert de Villaine and Michel Lafarge for example. Therefore, I hope it is of greater interest to wine people.
I was curious that in your book there is no mention of the wines of Portugal. Are you familiar with them?
JN A little bit, actually. In Portugal they were very disappointed I didn’t mention them. In the Portuguese edition of the book, the preface is written by one of the best winemakers in Portugal, in my opinion, Luis Pato in the Bairrada (and a fascinating example of someone who makes wines in a modern idiom, fruit forward and easily comprehensible but that are still redolent of the Bairrada terroirs). He’s become a friend, but he chided me in the preface for not having spoken of Portuguese wine! Actually I love his preface, because he takes issue with many of my positions. And this dissent, this skepticism of anyone’s views, is really the key to the book.
But I told him that the book, like the film, is not the work of a wine specialist seeking to take an exhaustive view of the wine world. I’m a layman. I made a bunch of wine lists for a bunch of different restaurants in different cities over the course of twenty-five years. I’m not an enologist. Even though I’m technically a sommelier, I’m not really a sommelier. I’m an outsider. The book is not in any way an attempt to offer an encyclopedic guide to the world of wine. It’s an extremely personal view of why I think, culturally and historically, and also in terms of sensual pleasure, why wine matters. It’s an extremely personal memoir from a film director bitten by the wine bug (not phylloxera!) since he was a little kid.
I speak only glancingly about German wines, but I probably drink German wines a third of the week and believe they’re among the finest white wines in the world, perhaps the ones that give me the most pleasure and sense of well-being. But I don’t speak German, I don’t spend that much time in Germany; I don’t feel that confident discussing them in a larger context because of that.
Portuguese I’ve only learned in the past five years since I’ve lived in Brazil. I didn’t know Portugal or Portuguese well before. But in the past two years, the past year and a half, I’ve been going there quite a bit. I’m looking on my bookshelf above the editing table, there’s a bottle of Donati, an empty bottle of Domaine de Beudon, their sublime 11,4% Humagne rouge, and a wine from Colares, which is just outside of Lisbon, in Azenhas do Mar, which is a seaside resort.
Colares has a sandy soil that has pre-phylloxera vines. They make a red that is absolutely unbelievable! It’s sad that Portugal has followed Spain a little bit, it seems like. There’s been a huge embrace of sort of the new world style, a sweet, fruity, alcoholic beverage. It’s a pity because these Colares wines are completely ignored in Portugal. But it does mean that they’re dirt cheap. And there are a couple of different producers, including an excellent cooperative called ARENA. Even in a big supermarket the last time I was there, I found a ‘97 Colares from Bernardino da Silva for about 12 €. An 11 year old red from pre-phylloxera vines that is absolutely delicious! But not much regarded in Portugal, like the sublime white of Buçaco made by a great gentleman, Alexandre de Almeida. Nor are the spectacular whites and red Dão and Bairrada wines of Caves São João even much discussed over there. I have dozens and dozens of half bottles in my cellar of the Frei João whites from the last 20 years’ vintages, astonishing Bairrada whites that run about 2 € a (full) bottle. They’re made in a slightly oxidized Rioja-style, sort of bitter-sweet. They are very beautiful, haunting wines.
But it’s also a cultural patrimony that is all too often ignored at home because the wines are not made in the fashionable oaky, sweet, alcohol-laden style. And imagine that the leading Portuguse wine magazine, Revista do Vinho, upbraided me for defending wines of terroir, which they characterize as strictly elitist and not democratic, while they shill for $100 whites invented yesterday in the Alentejo by flying winemakers and promoted heavily via paid ads in their magazine! Who’s not democratic again? It’s too funny.
I myself am looking forward to visiting Portugal in October. I shall look for the wines you’ve mentioned, and many more! Well, this has been a extraordinary experience.
JN I’m glad you’re not disappointed by the level of bullshit! You must have been prepared for it. Anyway, since you’re a neighbor, give my best to Randall Grahm. I like Randall a lot.
I will. His search for terroir goes on.
JN As It does for all of us.
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