Chateau Monty - A Review

Is it too much to hope that wine can be treated as a subject worthy of mature consideration for television? That’s a rhetorical question – TV will always wave its magic wand and make everything dumber than a first growth Bordeaux in cask.

As they say where there’s muck, there’s dross. The tone of the programme was pitched between patronising chuckling at the inanities of the French and English alike and a faux-breathless wondering whether Monty’s project would bear fruit (in both senses). Even the name of the wine irritates me. In the Roussillon, a row of vines and a shed maketh a domaine, not a Chateau. Within five minutes there was a repetitive grinding noise that I couldn’t get out of my head – it was my teeth. Within a further five minutes I was chewing my elbow and by the commercial break I decided to emulate Monty and bury this manure that constituted this TV programme deep in the humus of my subconscious.

For this was chateau-bottled triteness with a vengeance. A story about creating a commercial product wine from a few rows of gnarled vines using an agricultural methodology that few people understand has terrific potential to inform as well as entertain, but TV requires portentous voice-overs prophesying doom and artificially ramping up the operatic conflict. Chateau Monty consequently surfed on vast rollers of cliché ranging from the jaunty Jean de Florette fluting background music to the beady-eyed, nosy French peasants twitching their net curtains as they inspected the la folie de l’Anglais.

Context was completely absent. The Roussillon itself is a fabulous wild wine region with an abundance of growers working biodynamically on their tiny vineyard plots. Monty was presented as an eccentric stranger in a strange land performing some kind of voodoo with cow’s poo-poo. There are plenty of expats ploughing a similar furrow; indeed the Languedoc-Roussillon has proved to be a melting pot for tradition and innovation. With such fabulous terroir it is only natural that growers want to return to the roots of winemaking…

Let me say now that I respect Monty Waldin very highly for flying the flag for organic and biodynamic wines and his endeavour – in outline – is a laudable one, to practise literally what he preaches.

Biodynamics is thus presented as the domaine of swivel-eyed fundamentalists and hippies. Mention of the lunar calendar brings forth the usual corny quip about a loony calendar. No opportunity is passed up for a lame joke or an excruciating pun. Geoffrey Palmer’s (the narrator) drawl seemed to say: “Can we be bothered with this load of old toss?” Chateau Monty needed to get down and dirty in an intellectual sense, by simultaneously respecting a philosophy and methodology espoused by farmers as well as wine growers whilst questioning its validity in a proper scientific fashion. Oh, I’m sorry, that would be the intelligent approach. Serious analysis was never going to be on this particular menu. If biodynamics ever aspired to credibility then its seriousness was blown by the frenetic cutting and blipverting in the name of entertainment.

The programme’s alienation effect is further compounded by confected nuggets of drama. As viewers we are perhaps becoming more attuned to the devices which manipulate the storyline. For example, when Monty’s assistant is proving difficult to rouse; a dog jumps onto her bed while she is slumbering.  Presumably she is also able to sleep peacefully through the fact that a cameraman and sound recordist are lurking in her bedroom.

Television deals in hyper-reality, a parallel world where all experiences are intensified as if magnified under a lens. Stories are cut and reshaped to form a narrative arc, time is bent or collapsed, musical rhythms are established. Our senses are constantly being frothed into an uncritical lather – well, drama-docs are the new soap, after all.

A la Player I’m pitching you my monster movie script: It’s A Year in Provence meets Against All Odds with a little Withnail and I thrown in. I think you know where I’m coming from. It casts itself:

Monty: Richard E Grant
Uncle Monty: Richard Griffiths
Monty’s wife: Juliette Binoche
Brummie Lass: Renee Zellweger
The Late Bill Baker: Brian Blessed
The Mayor: Matt Damon
The Lugubrious Voice of Geoffrey Palmer: The Lugubrious Voice of Sir Clement Freud