Obsessed with the West

What's this, a feature-length documentary film about wine? For general release in cinemas? People sniffing glasses and pontificating about wine for 79 minutes? Who'd pay to sit through that?

The Australian-made film Red Obsession opens at cinemas on Thursday, but it's not what you might expect. It's actually a ripping yarn, a fast-moving and exciting story that spans continents and has a compelling mix of ingredients: wealth and power, luxury and greed and vanity, beautiful scenery and buildings, and the mellifluous tones of Russell Crowe narrating.

It's been greeted enthusiastically at several film festivals, including Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne and Tribeca - where festival director Robert De Niro described it as one of his two favourites. You might expect a film that traces the collecting mania for luxury Bordeaux wines and the intervention of mega-wealthy Chinese buyers into the market to be produced in Europe or the US, but the entire team is Australian.

The movie, which cost $1.3 million, had its genesis on an international flight where Sydney-based master of wine and auctioneer Andrew Caillard had a chance conversation with Sydney-based filmmaker Warwick Ross, who also has a Mornington Peninsula vineyard, Portsea Estate. Caillard said prices for Bordeaux wines, especially Chateau Lafite, had shot into the stratosphere (Lafite's soaring by 1000 per cent) because of Chinese demand, and it would be fascinating to see what happened at the en primeur tastings for the 2010 Bordeaux, which was being hyped as the vintage of the century. They decided to make the film and within three weeks were in Bordeaux with a camera crew to shoot the event, where thousands of wine writers and traders from all over the world gather each year to taste the new vintage.

The timing was critical. ''Had we missed that, we wouldn't have had a film at all,'' Caillard says.

''The 2009 and '10 were two extraordinary vintages one after the other. It hadn't happened since 1899 and 1900 - over 100 years since two such remarkable back-to-back vintages. I said to Warwick, 'We've got to do it now, because if we don't do it now it'll never happen again in our lifetimes.'''

The film opens with a brief history of the Bordeaux region and wine trade, with stunning photography of the landscape and properties, and quickly moves to the market and its dynamics of price, supply and demand. A vast cast of characters, including winemakers, property owners, collectors, critics and retailers are interviewed.

The directors, Ross and David Roach, began asking themselves: ''Who are these people who are paying thousands of dollars for bottles of wine that they add soft drink to because it's not sweet enough?'' And the shooting moves to China, where we meet extraordinary people. Wine writer Fongyee Walker speaks eloquently, as does Singaporean scribe Ch'ng Poh Tiong. We meet a collector who makes a fortune manufacturing sex toys. And a colour-co-ordinated woman with purple spectacles, seated beside a purple pot plant.

As Ross retells it: ''She describes being at an auction and the price is going up … '300,000, 500,000, 700,000; I suddenly put my paddle up and said, 1.5 million!' And she looks Andrew straight in the eye as if to say, 'What do you think of that?'''

Another collector describes his technique of bidding at auctions: ''I just hold my paddle up in the air until I get the lot. I don't care what it costs.''

Ross says: ''That's the Chinese culture. We have a very different way of expressing our success. Telling people publicly how much money you've got shocks us a little bit, but it doesn't shock them.''

The narrative changed as shooting proceeded and the filmmakers kept making discoveries and being surprised.

Ross says: ''The big surprise was that while we knew China was having an effect [on the Bordeaux market], it was the extent of it.

''We were restructuring our questions to Chinese people. Where does this burning desire to own a bottle of Lafite come from?''

Poh Tiong says: ''If they've been through the Cultural Revolution, they've been to hell and back'' - which says a lot about this rampaging new customer for Bordeaux wine.

The Chinese had nothing to lose; they were really going for it. With time-lapse photography, we see a skyscraper erected in something like 15 days: 30 storeys - bang, bang, bang and it's done.

''There's a gasp from the audience when that building goes up,'' Ross says. ''People just can't believe what they're seeing. The Chinese were severed from their cultural roots during the Cultural Revolution from 1949 to 1979. As soon as they were given a bit of freedom they looked around and said, 'We want all that stuff out there' because we don't understand our culture any more. When we build a vineyard we want a replica chateau, and when we buy a scarf it has to be Hermes or Gucci and if it's luggage it has to be Louis Vuitton … but they're so aspirational because of what they've been through. They feel they have a lot of catching up to do. That, for me, is the most powerful thing in the film.''

At that point, the film becomes a little less about wine and more about the economic power shift from West to East.

''Bordeaux and Lafite became emblematic of what was happening on a much wider scale around the world,'' Ross says.

''Chinese buying sea ports; buying half a million hectares of land in Australia; protecting their future food supplies by doing these sorts of things around the world. And suddenly it was more about the rise of modern China through the prism of Bordeaux wine. That was a real shift in our narrative.''

If that sounds serious, the film is actually entertaining, often funny, and anything but stuffed shirt. It's serious at the core; in the telling, it's anything but.

Caillard sums up: ''The skill of telling a story in a short time is a very rare talent. More than 100 hours of footage was distilled down to 79 minutes of screen time.

''What David and Warwick have done is tell a story that is so interesting and so compelling that I hope it will become known as the wine film of the decade.''

huonhooke.com