As someone with a keen interest in wine and film, I can’t remember a time when so many features about the grape were whizzing around the film festival circuit. We have El Camino del Vino , a drama about a South American sommelier who loses his sense of taste; Red Obsession from Australia about the relationship between China and Bordeaux; A Year in Burgundy , an observational film about well-known French wine importer Martine Saunier; the self-explanatory documentary Les Terroiristes du Languedoc ; and Somm , a film about four American wine geeks trying to pass the Master Sommelier exams.
Why so many and why have they come along all at once? Perhaps it is simply because wine is such a popular interest worldwide nowadays, and some of the world’s wine fanatics must, by the law of averages, work in the film business. They presumably find their enthusiasm fuelled by phenomena in wine and feel impelled to record them, whatever the hurdles. These are numerous, as I know from my experience of having produced and certainly presented more TV series about wine than anyone else.
Many wine lovers are puzzled by the fact that there are now so many television programmes devoted to cooking and so few about wine, but the big problem with filming wine is that nothing moves. With cooking there is the excitement of kitchen action, and the highly visual transformation of ingredients into a dish. In vineyards, on the other hand, the wind may occasionally rustle a vine, a pruner may snip off a cane, and for about a week a year a troupe of pickers gathers ripe bunches of grapes in a rather repetitive way, but that’s about it. In the winery there is a little more to interest a cameraman: barrels to assemble or roll, fermenting purple must that may need to be punched down and, at long last, something that really does gather a bit of speed, the blessed bottling line.