It’s a sign of not only a region’s maturity, but also its high level of quality when people are clamoring to profile it via word and image. It’s the latter which we see here in the short film, “Penedès: Why Corpinnat Isn’t Cava” that’s been released by Vianédita.
As is the case with many wine-related documentary pieces, they have a number overhead and harvest shots that are well done and frame the setting in the Penedès region. These are however offset with what are clearly AI-generated images to illustrate the historical parts of the video. I realize that original art is expensive to generate, but there’s an aspect to this style of generative output that always comes up a bit short as it doesn’t really capture a true essence of the subject. That and there are a number of paintings and other works around Catalunya that could have been used for illustrative purposes, for free.
There follow a series of interviews with people involved with Corpinnat. Some are people who have been there from the beginning and others came in a touch later to the association. These are all fine, but there is also a narrative overlay of questions being asked by a non-native Spanish speaker which is a bit off putting. It’s a “talking head” aspect to documentaries that I’ve always found to be an issue as those involved really need to state the theme being argued, themselves. Being coaxed into it makes the whole thing seem forced.
Apparently the original idea of the project was to show both sides of the issue in why Corpinnat split from Cava. In asking the creators why Cava didn’t appear, they told me that it was because time was a constraint in terms of the length. While they didn’t state it, I would also mention that DO Cava is extremely hard to communicate with as they’ve firewalled themselves via a PR company. This hasn’t done anything to help their own narrative. Whether that was the specific case here or not, I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
If you’ve followed the story a bit over the last seven years, you’ll most likely know everything that’s presented, but for anyone new, it works as a general introduction to Corpinnat to better understand what’s been written to date by putting human faces to the story.
★★★☆☆
