Inspiring underdog sagas are can’t-miss entertainment.
Inspiring underdog documentaries are even better.
This one’s a jaw-dropper.
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| Matching team pullovers are a nice touch, but Team Zimbabwe — from left, Marlvin Gwese, Pardon Taguzu, Joseph Dhafana and Tinashe Nyamudoka — must train hard, if they're to enter the annual World Blind Wine Tasting Championships. |
They wound up in South Africa, which was ill-equipped to handle what eventually grew to roughly 1.5 million refugees from its northern neighbor.
Joseph, Marlvin, Tinashe and Pardon — who didn’t know each other — initially accepted whatever menial jobs they could find. Over the course of time, in each case entirely by accident, all four discovered they had an amazing talent for winetasting.
This, despite the fact that none had even tasted wine before.
Marlvin, raised Pentecostal, technically isn’t even allowed to drink alcohol, although he cheekily points out — on camera — that since Jesus turned water into wine, drinking it surely must be allowed.
Eventually, each man became a well-respect sommelier in a top-notch South African restaurant … where, it must be mentioned, they often were the only Black presence among the staff and patrons.
They came to the attention of expat French sommelier Jean Vincent Ridon, who had the audacious notion to bring them together as exiled “Team Zimbabwe” for the 2017 World Blind Wine Tasting Championships, held each year in (where else?) Burgundy, France.
The film begins as Ridon gifts the four men with numbered, matching Team Zimbabwe pullovers (probably also the moment when Coe and Ross decided to make a film).
The quartet is irresistible. All four men have great camera presence; they’re modest, cheerful, passionate, a little bit shy, and obviously overwhelmed by how their lives have changed … and how they’re about to change a lot more.
Coe, Ross and editor Paul Murphy divide this saga between the intense training that takes place, during the weeks leading up to the competition, and each man’s back-story. They’re uniformly grim: even more sobering, given the matter-of-fact manner in which each recalls his personal experience.
Joseph and his wife left their 2-year-old son behind, when they and dozens of other refugees paid smugglers to sneak them across the border in a railway car: a container that turned into an oven in the hot sun, very nearly killing the people inside.
Tinashe puts words to the feelings that still haunt all four, who carry the burden of missing kumusha: the Shona word for their homeland.
Nor has their new country been entirely welcoming. Brief archival footage shows one of the bloody 2009 Johannesburg atrocities, as helpless refugees are beaten and killed by xenophobic South Africans.
Even now, having excelled in their new profession, these four — and their families — remain vulnerable to occasional hostility and random muggings.
We marvel at their calmness and quiet nobility.
Coe and Ross never dwell overlong on the harrowing journey that brought these men to this moment. We also take a deep — and fascinating — dive into the arcane realm of professional winetasting: the training that fine-tunes the astonishing ability to identify a wine (label concealed) by grape variety, vintage, country of origin, region and producer.
It’s a team effort — as it will be in France, during the competition — where the four are able to briefly discuss and argue details before arriving at an agreed-upon verdict.
Obstacles remain, not the least of which is the matter of money; these men can’t begin to pay their way to France. Enter British journalist and wine critic Jancis Robinson, who suggests a possible solution.
Then there’s the elephant in the room. Upper-echelon competitive winetasting is a thoroughly white environment. (Until very recently, it was thoroughly white and exclusively male.) The politeness which often greets Team Zimbabwe’s goal often is superficial, frequently awkward, and occasionally hostile.
Ridon, who coaches the South African team, can take them only so far, due to the obvious conflict of interest. Team Zimbabwe then makes a crucial mistake, by hiring celebrated (?) French sommelier Denis Garret, who — quite unexpectedly — turns into the villain of this piece.
The blustery, sloppy and extremely vainglorious Garret clearly is more interested in the degree to which this documentary might enhance his profile. Frankly, he’s a pompous clown.
The antipathy between Ridon and Garret also is eyebrow-raising, the former clearly very worried about the direction Team Zimbabwe’s training suddenly takes.
Garret is a liability for another reason: A gunshot accident left him deaf in one ear, and compromised in the other. Given that each team’s coach is required to write down the agreed-upon verdict of each tasting — without influencing the decision, of course — it’s obviously terrifying to put your fate in a buffoon who can’t discern whether you’ve said Austria or Australia.
Team Zimbabwe obviously will make it to Burgundy; we wouldn’t have much of a film otherwise. The competition itself — due to the degree we’ve become invested in these four men — is tension-laden, edge-of-the-seat, heart-in-mouth suspense.
This is a marvelous little drama, and it deserves far more attention than it has gotten thus far.
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