Blind Ambition: Underdog African Sommelier Story Adds Geniality to the Wine-Film Genre
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B+
Movies about wine, from Sideways to SOMM to Bottle Shock, conjure all sorts of high drama, typically driven by obsessive, elitist, and decidedly less-than-loveable characters. Not Blind Ambition.
The documentary — which follows four Zimbabwean men who coincidentally but collectively became sommeliers despite hailing from a nation with zero wine culture and who then went on to place in 2017’s World Blind Tasting Championship alongside learned teams from Belgium, France, and the U.S. — is inspirational. Humbling, even.
It’s also a ball to watch, mainly because its four protagonists are genuinely delightful.
Having escaped Robert Mugabe’s brutally oppressive landlocked nation, Joseph, Marlvin, Pardon and Tinashe independently flee to neighbouring South Africa in search of a better life. Each man possesses the exquisite strength required to survive the everyday hardships of forced relocation in not overly welcoming environs. Yet each, through a series of different events, find their way to wine.
Filmmakers Robert Coe and Warwick Ross follow the four individually — and together as a team of top tasters —chronicling the privations that drove them from their beloved homeland and into Cape Town, where they slowly built new lives with wives, children, and each other.
Joseph, Marlvin, Pardon and Tinashe develop their palates, working with sommeliers like Jean Vincent Ridon — who ultimately coached the competing South African team at the World Blind Tasting Championship in the Lanquedoc region — while attracting the attention of heavyweights like Briton Jancis Robinson. She led crowdfunding efforts to bring Team Zimbabwe to France to compete, hoping to nurture diversity in the very white, overwhelmingly European wine field.
It's not all sunshine and Syrah. Blind wine tastings, which require competitors to identify not just the grape in the glass but also its provenance and vintage, are notoriously challenging as the Italian team, which placed dead-last at the 2017 World Blind Tasting Championship, could attest. (The towering travails of becoming a master sommelier are studiously chronicled in 2012’s abovementioned SOMM).
That the Zimbabweans, who had never even tasted wine until South Africa, possessed the focus, discipline, and desire to compete at a world-class level while working to support families at home in Cape Town — and in some cases, back in the old country — is incredible, a rousing immigrant story begging to be told.
Even super-snobby, world-famous sommelier Denis Garret, who coached the quartet in France ahead of the Championship, is more than a little blown away by Team Zim’s dazzling accomplishments of which the World Blind Tasting Championship was only the start.
As the epilogue reveals, all four sommeliers went on to amazingly diverse careers in everything from wine importing to cultivation in the aftermath of their first landmark win. (There were other, and better, wins to come).
Blind Ambition doesn’t rewrite any rules about documentary filmmaking, and it stumbles into the hokey at the very end. But if one subscribes to the adage that the story is the thing, then it’s hard to beat.
Even better, it inspired this clever verse in an off-the-cuff email from my esteemed colleague Liam Lacey, reprinted (with permission) here:
Some tipplers who came from Zimbabwe,
Didn’t know a Merlot from a Soave,
But they learned all the tricks,
Of the Wine Olympics,
And now are considered quite suave.
If that ain’t a recommendation, I don’t know what is. And yes, you’ll be aching for a glass of something great by the film’s finish. Cheers to that.
Blind Ambition. Directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross. Opens October 7 in Toronto, October 12 in St. Catharines, October 14 in London, October 20-23 at the Barrie Film Festival, October 21 in Vancouver, October 27 at the Devour! Food Film Festival Halifax, and October 27 at the Windsor International Film Festival.