They say in vino veritas, and the bitter truth at the heart of Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s Burgundy is that even vignerons of France’s most reputable wine region are thinking about the end times. Luxurious Bordeaux houses sit on a frightening surplus of unsold barrels, victims of shifting consumer tastes. Elite Burgundy estates now face the opposite problem, with meagre harvest after meagre harvest, a shortfall increasingly attributed to climate change rewriting the rules of the ancient terroir. Even the grandest producers now resort to uncharacteristic interventions: more pesticide to save stocks from fungal decay and adding sugar to half-empty barrels to jump-start fermentation. Today, they produce wines that in name still recall the grandeur of Burgundy, but no longer fully live up to their storied legacy.
Indeed, there’s something rotten in the state of the Côte d’Or, which makes it exactly the right moment for documentary duo Dweck and Kershaw to poke around this rarefied, closely guarded world. Having burrowed through the niche subscenes of Long Island stock car racers, Italian truffle hunters and Argentine gauchos, they now sink their teeth into Burgundian soil, a sheltered gourmand haven they were welcomed into, much to their surprise. The joyousness of this documentary makes clear this was a pleasurable assignment, and they stayed long enough to find an octet of characters who embody the passing of the baton in a milieu steeped in tradition.
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Burgundy’s timeless grandeur is personified by octogenarian Bertrand, the scion of a 160-year-old family business concerned with passing the vineyard on to the next generation. The obvious candidate would be his grandson Melchior, but the silver-spooned heir seems more drawn to the fast life of the financial sector’s nouveau riche than to the slow-paced parochial confines. Enzo, one of Bertrand’s ambitious blue-collar workers on the estate, would be the next best thing, but Burgundy’s most valuable properties rest on aristocratic principles of blue-blooded lineage. Nonetheless, Dweck and Kershaw present Enzo as the perfect synthesis of old and new: a handsome 20-something obsessed with all things classical. He dons an Alain Delon necklace, is enamoured of French screen icon Jean Gabin, and gushes over post-war pop classics. Were it not for his humble upbringing, he surely would have been handed the keys to the kingdom already.
A budding relationship between Enzo and aspiring sommelière Céleste lets Burgundy imbibe from the fountain of youth, while other stewards of the old ways – a nostalgic wine critic, an indomitable maître d’ at a Michelin three-star – prepare their departure. It’s a productive binary for a dynamically composed film that tries to balance the Proustian reveries of the old heads with the more high-spirited, subjective modes of expression brought by all the fresh blood injected into this time-worn terrain. It all adds up to an easily digestible mosaic documentary that at this point feels entirely on brand for the duo, and at times a bit too much on the nose.
Four collaborative films in, the Dweck and Kershaw formula can be distilled to delightfully off-kilter and ultimately existentialist portraits of communities still tethered to their dirt. Much like the truffle dogs in their previous hit documentary The Truffle Hunters (2020), the filmmakers have developed an extremely good nose for cinematic delights. These are instant crowd-pleasers, layered with the essential bitter undertones for much-needed gravitas, all enriched with a few sprinkles of the unexpected – much in the way a rich wine palate finds an interesting tension by transcending its primary, secondary and tertiary aromas with the intended faults that bring in the funk.
In the press notes for Burgundy, the directors speak of synesthesia, in the way they try to capture the euphoric sensuality of this gastronomic paradise. You could also say that at times they overindulge in romanticised imagery: especially the nouvelle vague-inspired 8mm footage of Enzo and Céleste as the film’s very own Bonnie and Clyde feels a bit overcooked. In a documentary that offers plenty of passionate vignettes steeped in genuine ritual, the more fictitious elements tend to distract from what is already an intoxicating journey through this garden of earthly delights.
