Mondovino

(Herald rating: * ** * * )

The pick of the crop from the great selection of documentaries in last year's festival, this rambling, angry and charming film is a hard-hitting expose of the globalisation of the wine business and the steady destruction of a culture almost as old as civilisation.

It is also, not incidentally, an unashamed valentine to vino: director Nossiter, a long-time sommelier, has spoken in interviews of his deep love for wine "not just because it gets me sweetly drunk but because it is an expression of love; of the love of man for the earth; of love between men; of love of man for his culture."

It's that love that drives Nossiter to uncork the story of what is happening to centuries-old traditions of winemaking as the money men move in.

Using a small handheld DVD camera and a crew of two, he has travelled the world to assemble a cast of characters that, as others have observed, might have stepped from the pages of a novel by Balzac.

The main witnesses in Nossiter's case are Alix de Montille and Aime Guibert, the last in two lines of French winemaking families who deplore the way wine has become a global business in which science and money have taken over from tradition and terroir.

"Le vin est mort [wine is dead]," they declare, noting that French has developed a verb "parkeriser" meaning to manipulate the taste of your wine so that it will rate highly with the influential American critic Robert Parker.

The rogues' gallery, by contrast, is large: Michael and Robert Mondavi, the Californian billionaires who set out to make the world's most expensive wine; Michel Rolland, consultant to the new wine aristocracy, for whom micro-oxygenation is oenology's philosopher's stone; and Parker, the lawyer-turned-wine-judge who would doubtless regard himself as impartial, but who emerges as insufferably smug and shallow, not to mention hopelessly compromised. Even his dog recognises that.

Nossiter's film is not short on passion or political commitment. His guiding philosophy is that we are "living through the voluntary co-opting of small-scale production into the cultural and economic needs of the new world order".

But the scale of his crew and the self-effacing nature of his approach means he can conjure as much rage as Michael Moore without resorting to that buffoon's bludgeoning tactics.

The fact that Mondovino has been condemned in France and the US by the bigwigs of the industry is indication enough that it is, in the scheme of things, an important film.

It's also, for anyone interested in wine, an extremely enjoyable one. Cheers.

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Nossiter
RUNNING TIME: 135 mins
RATING: PG, adult themes
SCREENING: Academy from Thursday