There’s More to Wine Than Glamor

Two films document a community and a family struggling to build a legacy

Recently, I’ve enjoyed two thoughtful documentaries about wine that go well beyond the usual glamor shots of vineyards and barrels to explore the joys and travails of making wine. I hope you enjoy them. In my next post, I’ll offer a riotous novel poking fun at wine’s pretensions and the chaotic transformation influencer culture is wreaking on wine journalism.

When I started watching We the Wine People, a new film by Chrisa Giorgi about the Virginia wine community, I expected to spend the 96 minutes name-checking my favorite winemakers, admiring drone footage of the commonwealth’s most beautiful vineyards, and listening to a familiar story of Virginia triumphing against all odds in producing world-class wines.

We the Wine People gave me all that and so much more. Giorgi, of Wine Cellar Stories Productions, covers the usual history, beginning with early colonial laws requiring settlers to grow vines. We hear of Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful attempts to grow European vinifera varieties at Monticello, a quest ultimately defeated by native pests and pestilence, war and the constant distraction of helping build a country. She segues to the modern era and the success of today’s winemakers in dealing with Virginia’s often tricky climate (spring frosts, summer humidity, harvest rains and hurricanes). She doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges. The film starts by dramatizing the single-most stubborn obstacle winemakers continue to face: Customers who persist in asking, “Virginia makes wine?” ¹

Along the way, Giorgi deftly weaves in issues that will take Virginia wine — and, to be honest, American wine in general — into its next era. We learn of generational change at Linden Vineyards, efforts by the Virginia Winemakers Research Exchange to identify and even develop new grape varieties suitable for the changing climate, and the community’s inclusiveness, with “incubator” wineries such as Common Wealth Crush helping remove traditional entry barriers and foster creativity from a new cadre of winemakers.

We the Wine People is now streaming on Apple TV. I highly recommend it for all wine fans, not just those looking for cameos by their friends.

Generational change and legacy in California’s Eden

Eden brings us around the fire pit and into the living room of Jeffrey and Ellie Patterson, who have tended Mount Eden Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains for more than 40 years. Director Christopher McGilvray and his crew from Nomadic Bear Productions spent seven years with the Pattersons and their children, Reid and Sophie. The main theme is generational change, with the initial reluctance and gradual acceptance by the children to come home and take over the winery.

Mount Eden Vineyards traces its history back to the post-Prohibition days of the 1930s, when Martin Ray apprenticed with Paul Masson and later, on Masson’s advice, bought the land and planted the estate vineyard for Mount Eden. The Patterson’s joined in the early 1980s, after Ray had lost the winery to his investors, and became majority shareholders in 2008. During their tenure, Jeffrey Patterson expanded and modernized the vineyards and established Mount Eden and its sister label, Domaine Eden, as one of California’s best Chardonnay and Pinot Noir producers.

Eden is no romanticized view of a small, family-owned winery with back-to-the-land spiritual discovery. It’s a gritty, heartfelt exploration of a quest to create a meaningful wine legacy in the European tradition of generational change instead of the American way of cashing in by selling the winery at the height of its popularity. Fans of Mount Eden will of course enjoy it, but so should anyone who’s ever dreamt of tending a lonely vineyard on a remote mountaintop.

Eden is currently available on demand on Prime, iTunes, YouTube and Fandango.

1. This always grinds my grits. I’ve been writing about Virginia wine since the 1990s! How can people still not know??