Funny how a new idea or connection can suddenly pop up everywhere.

So it is for me with this eerie similarity between how we treat kids and wine. I heard filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter interviewed on NPR this morning about his "Mondovino" (set for DVD release July 12.) He deplored the global marketing and contests/competitions that together have created wine's disturbingly standardized taste today -- a regression to some mean that is childish, simplistic, superficial, undemanding and robotic. He believes we're infantalizing and institutionalizing a few thousand years of individuality and complex nuance, apparently for the sake of control, predictability and winning contest points.

He might as well have been talking about what school has done to education.

An old NY Times feature described Nossiter's film as an obsession to be true to his own "real love of wine" even if it angered other "wine-lovers" which it seems to have done (watch for more fallout from the 10-part TV serialization to come!) and said he meant the film to dramatize his "battle for the soul of his favorite beverage."

From the movie's box:
"Wine has been a symbol of Western civilization for thousands of years. Never has the fight for its soul been as desperate. Never has there been so much money -and pride- at stake. But the battle lines are not what you'd expect: local versus multinational, simple peasants versus powerful captains of industry. In the world of wine, it is never the usual suspects."

http://www.specialtydvd.com/mondovino.htm