Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary about winemaking and agriculture in Italy is both informative and inspiring. Nossiter revisits a topic he tackled 10 years ago in a film called Mondovino.

Natural Resistance explores the debate surrounding wine classification and whether the process of standardisation is taking the true taste from the wine and food we comsume. It is a topic that I admit I was not familiar with and had to look up DOC to find out what they were referring too- DOC is a government classification to confirm the provenance of the wine that carries its label.

However many winemakers in Italy are rebelling against this classification as they believe they would have to saturate their own wine in order to conform to the DOC standards. They continue to produce their own natural wine that is free from any preservatives and chemicals. They are in this way the rebels of the wine industry.

The film is cut together with clips from Charlie Chaplin films, historical documentaries about the idyll of country life, which shows the general corruption of the world’s governments to package up a standard product that they can sell globally that will always taste “right” and that will make them a hug amount of money.

You are really on the side of the farmers and winemakers in this film, who often drastically undersell their wine as they cannot and do not want to meet the DOC standards. They continue to sell what they see as superior natural wine. A very interesting insight into a world we rarely see.

Niki Alexandrou