What wine pairs well with beefcake? Burgundy, of course.

That’s the conclusion one might reasonably draw from the new documentary directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw that’s set in the famous wine-making region of France. Among the colorful personnages in Burgundy is Enzo Ferraroli, a young hunk who goes shirtless at times as he learns he winemaking business, pressing grapes in a vat, for instance.

The film, which just held its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, also foregrounds “a landowner [Bertrand Devilliard, patriarch of the Devilliard family] obsessed with his family’s legacy, an enthusiastic young worker hoping to start his own vineyard [that would be Enzo], a female apprentice sommelier learning how to talk about wine and a divorced wine critic going on many hapless dates,” as the Telluride program notes. (The wine critic muses about how wonderful it is to drink a wine bottled in the year of one’s birth, and his good fortune to have been born in 1971, an excellent vintage).

Dweck and Kershaw explored the culture and characters of Italy’s Piedmont region in their Oscar-shortlisted documentary The Truffle Hunters, and Argentina’s cowboys and cowgirls in Gaucho Gaucho, shot in beautiful black and white. They’re drawn to terrains and individuals who exist, in some sense, out of time as they maintain very long-held traditions, be it truffle hunting, horsemanship, or in Burgundy, grand cru viticulture and elegant dining. Enzo seems transported from the past – he’s a young man of 20, yet célibataire in two meanings of the French word – a bachelor and celibate. He’s got old school manners and notions that would make him plus a l’aise in the 1950s, perhaps, or earlier.

The film unspools at a leisurely pace, at the rate one would expect to consume a sumptuous five-course meal. Indeed, a good portion of the action transpires at a 3-star Michelin restaurant presided over by a maître d’hôtel with extraordinary attention to detail. He can spot a place setting millimeters out of alignment from across the room. Ce bonhomme assidu puts so much energy into serving his guests that he’s physically spent by the end of an evening.

“For me, it brought back a lot of my memories from working in fine dining,” Telluride patron Henry Mitchell told me after attending a screening (I hailed a few moviegoers for their reaction as the film let out at the Sheridan Theater). “A lot of the attention to detail that many may see as unnecessary, many may see as just tradition, but I think there are a lot of pieces in this movie that touched on tradition – [Bertrand Devilliard] choosing to pass along the domain to the grandson or to someone else. So, I think that was a good takeaway for me. And then also people moving on in life and having passion with one thing and thinking that maybe a change of venue or a change of environment may bring them happiness. But that is not always the case — they say wherever you’re at, there you are.”

Patrick and Patricia Pringle took special interest in Burgundy because they have visited the region (as well as the Jura, from where Enzo comes). The obsession with detail displayed by the characters is “spot on,” Patricia told me. “It’s exactly right.”

Patrick noted that the Jura is “not a highfalutin [area]… They have a very famous wine that goes with a very famous chicken dish, but that’s pretty much it… In the wine industry, that’s the other side of the tracks, especially compared to the royalty of the Burgundy.”

Enzo wishes to shed his perhaps roughhewn background (and his relative poverty) and somehow ascend to the class of a Bertrand Devilliard. “[The filmmakers] do get the struggle with classes in Burgundy,” Pringle said, “and I won’t necessarily say ‘patriarchy,’ but certainly it’s the families that are still there and very much entrenched.”

Entrenched in the land – or at least hiring people like Enzo to stick their boots in the earth to produce great wine.

This ‘vintage’ documentary premiered in Venice before heading to Telluride. Burgundy screens in a couple of days at the Deauville American Film Festival in France, followed later this month by San Sebastián in Spain, Zurich in Switzerland and then next month as the Aspen Film Festival in Colorado and the Mill Valley Film Festival in Northern California.

Mill Valley is located within an hour of Napa and Sonoma, where I hear they make pretty good wine as well. Whether the reds there equal a Burgundy from Bourgogne, well, I leave that to a grand sommelier like the documentary’s Eric Goettelmann, or his apprentice, the young and lovely Céleste Kalis.

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