Blind Ambition: wine doc with a glass half full

Although Blind Ambition touches on the ravages of colonialism, racism and xenophobia, the documentary remains firmly within the “something nice to watch with your family” genre. Depending on your viewpoint (and your relatives), this can be understood as a strength. The film follows four Zimbabwean migrants living in South Africa who travel to France to represent their home country in the World Wine Tasting Championship. The title references a core element of tasting: the bottles from which wine tasters drink are covered in order to prevent any advantage in determining the wine’s origin, or prejudices about the wine.

That wine tasting is a thoroughly wealthy, white, Western hobby is not up for debate. Not only does it require a great deal of money to expose oneself to a wide variety of wines (or, say, do a tour of vineyards in southern France) in order to develop one’s palate, it also requires a familiarity with fruits such as strawberries that are native to Europe. For those outside of these regions, the learning curve is significantly steeper. This is true even for the elite: aspiring South African and Chinese tasters are limited by which wines are imported to their country. The documentary shows how, once in Burgundy, the (all-white) South African team undergoes the same rigorous training that the Zimbabweans do.

Of course, the elitist character of wine tasting begets the question: who cares? Why does this “sport” that perpetuates all the worst aspects of food culture continue to exist – especially considering the number of scientific studies that have seemingly disproved the objectivity of wine tasting altogether? Why would anyone want to be a part of this? Throughout the film, the Zimbabwean team makes clear that they wish to “prove” their national palate on the international stage. This is alternately a revolutionary act – to dispel the centuries-old image of the passive, colonized Other; to reject the idea that the poor do not have taste; to assert the complex personhood of immigrants – and a manifestation of respectability politics: to take an antiquated refinement test while being at extreme disadvantage.

Blind Ambition doesn’t attempt to probe such contradictions, as it would rather focus on the rousing example of the exceptional over the many – entertainment that is inspiring and doesn’t push against the status quo too much. The Zimbabwean team recount their long yet largely identical journey to wine tasting: each managed to get a job at an extremely posh, white-owned restaurant after making the harrowing journey across the border. Even though this is meant to humanize them, the film sometimes adheres too strictly to the formal and narrative conventions of contemporary docuseries, and apportions the men’s lives outside of wine into small, bland bites: Pardon Taguzu becomes “the sporty one,” while Marlvin Gwese is “the religious one.”

These bubbly sequences do manage to raise a wealth of social, economic and historical issues, but directors Robert Coe and Warwick Ross opt not to ask their subjects about them. Tinashe Nyamudoka, who is cringe-inducingly introduced in slow motion running his outstretched fingers through wild grass, is deeply connected to his family’s farm, and wishes to cultivate his own wine there. This desire introduces a myriad of issues around native plants, land usage and food culture in a part of the world that has been aggressively exploited for its natural resources for several hundred years, but Nyamudoka’s perspective must be imagined.

Blind Ambition also fails to show Africans who aren’t serving as human interest stories responding to or even setting up subjects. While all the talking-head wine experts are unsurprisingly (but not entirely excusably) white, the filmmakers elect to have only two, white interviewees explain Zimbabwe’s financial crisis and the tensions caused by mass Zimbabwean immigration to South Africa.

However, one could argue that indigenous Africans’ response to white European exploitation is documented in scenes involving the team’s coach, Denis Garret. Supposedly once the world’s greatest wine taster, Garret is at first presented as a charming French eccentric who’s a little past his prime. Soon it becomes clear that this man is not only extremely irritating, but so self-obsessed it actively harms the team’s performance. (During the competition, Garret constantly interrupts the Zimbabweans while they try to reason out the type of wine, and records their answers incorrectly and in pen.) Even though Garret’s buffoonery reinforces the notion that wine tasting is frivolous, the pain of seeing an otherwise composed Nyamudoka quietly crying after learning his team has placed second-to-last suggests otherwise.

► Blind Ambition is in UK cinemas now.