Red Obsession

Red Obsession is a documentary about wine. This is a website about movies. Mike and I like movies, and we like wine, so this review is totally going to be biased. Aside from that fact, however, you should still go out and watch this doco.

Why? Well, my wife doesn't like movies much, nor wine for that matter, but she did enjoy this documentary a lot. It focuses primarily on the changing wine industry and how globalisation is causing a real shift in who is buying the wine, where the buzz is and how the industry is coping with this change.

It mainly focuses on the French region of Bordeaux which by default is the most famous of wine regions. It does this because China in its dramatic climb up the money ladder over the past few decades has become rather fond of a drop or two of a nice Bordeaux. Infact it has been enjoying it so much that the average bottle prices have gone up 1000's of percent. We are talking $25,000 for a single bottle of wine. We are talking auctions where people are literally spending millions of dollars buying cases of wine. It’s insane.

And it’s a real contrast to what used to be the classic, romantic, la société d'appréciation du vin. Instead of French and European people getting together all toffee like and sipping on their wines in their gardens and being a big haughty taughty, you now have these billionaire Chinese people ringing up on the phone saying they want to buy every single bottle of the 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild left in the cellar at the Chateaux. To put it simply the French said "I fart in your general direction."

If you like your wine and you like your documentaries, you will be hard pressed (pun intended) to go past this little gem. It’s beautifully filmed and I had no idea that Bordeaux looked like this causing it to go high on the list of places I want to visit. It’s entertaining with the crazy Asian richies and their eccentric nature and it’s narrated by Russel Crowe.

Go get a red, open it, sit back and enjoy the film. SCORE: 8/10

IMDB Info for Red Obsession