(RENEGADE)

*
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

“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. ›››

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

( Photographs by JOHN MIDGLEY ) DEC.05.GQ.C OM.237


*dogNossiter with his wife, twins, and faithful
outside his home in Rio.
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
23 8.GQ.C O M . D E C.05
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 Napa powers that be are doing their best
to discredit me. Saying it’s a French documentary
is like saying I’m a Communist.”
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
(RENEGADE)
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
(RENEGADE)
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
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-

* EBERTS OF THE WINE WORLD siter says, “That is not accidental, that it’s
misunderstood as a French documentary.
Because people—the Wine Spectator and
Unlike lawyers or doctors or kids with satanic powers, wine
the Napa powers that be—are doing their
experts don’t see their world represented on the big screen
level best to discredit me. You know, by
very often. GQ called a handful of America’s wine authorities
saying it’s a French documentary, it’s like
to get their response to Jonathan Nossiter’s film.
saying I’m a Communist, right, during the
McCarthy era. It’s a witch hunt. It’s un-
JOE BASTIANICH, ROBERT BOHR, WINE LARRY STONE, WINE LEO MC CLOSKEY, fucking-believable.”
CO-OWNER, DIRECTOR, CRU, NEW DIRECTOR, RUBICON, COFOUNDER, ENOLOGIX, What makes it even harder to fucking
RESTAURANTS BABBO, YORK CITY SAN FRANCISCO SONOMA, CALIFORNIA
OTTO, AND LUPA, AND “I loved it. “I wish that he “I knew that believe is that the European powers that
STORE ITALIAN WINE Granted, he made would have been able Nossiter would stir be—embarrassed by the things Nossiter
MERCHANTS, NEW a remarkably blunt to portray the people up a hornet’s nest, caught them saying on film—have tried to
YORK CITY point, but that doesn’t that he interviewed because the wine explain it all away as the work of a typical-
“I thought it was mean it’s invalid. If in all their complexity, industry has no
kind of ridiculous. you respect tradition rather than trying gadflies willing to ly rude, ill-bred American. Michel Rolland,
It wasn’t responsible and terroir, ultimately to reduce them all comment on the wine the globe-trotting French wine consultant
journalism. He was you produce a better to stick figures that media itself. They feel who was infuriated by the slice of his life
just getting his agenda product than if were either heroes or they will be punished. shown in the documentary—he’s seen
across. It wasn’t you are producing villains. None of those That causes a culture
rushing from vineyard to vineyard, telling
COURTESY OF THINKFILM

even journalism; it wine like you would people are villains, of cover-up in the
was fiction.” produce any other and very few of them industry, and he put winemakers how to technically manipu-
widget. That, sadly, are heroes. They’re all his finger on it. The late their wines—attacked Nossiter in the
is what is happening, people who love wine, film broke a pact that British press as an ignorant American who
and his point, in and they’re doing existed between
my estimation, is what they think is best the wine producers “must have grown up, like so many Ameri-
absolutely correct.” for it.” and the wine press.” cans, surrounded by Coca-Cola, hamburg-
—JORDAN REED ers, and The Muppet Show, which produces
a very particular kind of culture.”

240.GQ.C O M . D E C.05
(RENEGADE)
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
242.GQ.C O M . D E C.05
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
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.
MEN OF THE YEAR
G R E AT P E R FO R M A N C ES / 0 6 . 0 5
Party
Crasher
In which a Republican
senator has the balls
to differ with the
president on Iraq
°W
hat 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
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
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 MAC NAMARA