sour grapes.(Mondovino)(The Best of Youth )(Movie Review)

Byline: John Powers

Like a brilliant extended footnote to Sideways, Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Mondovino examines the decadent soul of the twenty-first-century wine biz. For millennia, Nossiter suggests, artisanal winemakers turned out wines (the good, the bad, and the bubbly) embodying a unique terroir, the almost mystical union of a particular soil, a particular climate, a particular grape, even a particular cast of the sun. These days, winemaking is ruled by billionaire modernizers who have snapped up old wineries and used such "aging" tricks as micro-oxygenation to produce an increasingly homogenized product-terroir has been replaced by technique. In telling this story, which has already made the film a critically acclaimed scandale in France, Nossiter flits from Bordeaux to Brazil, Florence to Napa. We meet a smug Tuscan aristocrat who has eagerly sold off centuries-old vineyards, a crotchety old Burgundy winemaker who rails against the Mondavis, laughing wine consultant Michel Rolland, who preaches the gospel of the new, not to mention the Don Corleone of the international wine market: Maryland-born ...