The Taste and the Power | Jonathan Nossiter

It all starts with a mysteriously defective bottle of white wine that Jonathan Nossiter, a cosmopolitan filmmaker in love with wine (or a wine-loving globetrotter enamored with cinema), brings back one day to his favorite Parisian wine merchant. This is the starting point of a long journey and an intense reflection on this particular object that is wine. Nossiter visits wine cellars and the finest dining establishments in Paris, invites us to a blind tasting in southern Brazil, and above all, takes us to meet the winemakers of Burgundy, astonishing characters, fierce peasants, and true lords of the vine. From Proustian reveries to lively dialogues around a gargantuan meal, from cinematic reminiscences to deep dives into the famous French terroir, from rants against "wine critics" to raptures before the most beautiful bottles, a question lingers like a common thread: How to talk about wine? In this "divine" as well as earthly liquid, elusive and striking, Nossiter sees the quintessence of our humanity, our memory, our identity. But wine is also, in these times of globalization, a major political and cultural issue. A stake of all passions, all snobberies, all rivalries - a stake of all powers. This book, like no other, takes us on a quest for this Holy Grail (in wine, there is truth), profound and light like a 2004 Gevrey-Chambertin or like a certain mysterious bottle of white wine...