Six years after The Truffle Hunters, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw have made a movie about wine. This makes sense: what’s the point in dedicating yourself to a study of fungal delicacies, after all, if you aren’t planning to knock it back with a decent glass of red? The filmmakers’ latest culinary caper is instructively titled Burgundy and takes place in and around that famed wine-producing region. What separates it from Hunters and other films like it, however, is how it playfully narrativizes the stories on show, stretching the boundaries of what a doc like this can and should look like in the process.
Burgundy is a film with characters and arcs, a love story, 8mm dream sequences, and shots so intricately blocked and composed that it can feel like an ad campaign for Burberry (complimentary). The key subjects are given monikers (“The Boy,” “The Girl,” and “The Critic” all feature) and it’s always left intriguingly unclear if what we’re seeing has been captured or staged. At no point overstaying its clean 90-minute runtime, this is all quite infectious and fun, and Burgundy doesn’t shirk its responsibility to inform. Whether it’s depicting the most interesting, baffling, or eccentric aspects of this intoxicating business, Dweck and Kershaw (who are both American) remain resolutely curious about and endeared by it.
The aforementioned “Boy” is Enzo Ferraroli, a handsome striver who convincingly dresses like he was born in the 1940s and, as the movie’s throwback poster suggests, wouldn’t look out of place on a screen with the likes of an Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film centers, if it has a center, on Enzo’s ambitions to own his own plot, following him as he learns the ropes on a historic family estate run by the Devilliard family. (The real patriarch, Bertrand, pops up here and there to play billiards, hunt game, or lounge by the pool.) Dweck and Kershaw also follow a blossoming romance between Ferraroli and an apprentice sommelier named Céleste Kalis, who works front-of-house at a refined local restaurant whose resident nose, Eric Goettelmann, could easily pass for Anton Ego.
Outside of these distinctive leads, Dweck and Kershaw have great fun following the spiritual and romantic misadventures of a wine critic named Guillaume Baroin who moves between tastings, dates, and therapy visits in a shirt that I can only hope in some way reflects the exuberance of his prose. There is also an experienced maître d’, Patrick Maniere, whose admirably detail-orientated approach to the job eventually makes you a little worried for his work-life balance. Given access to an abundance of memorable locations (the vaguely Death Star supply room-coded tasting area is incredible) Dweck and Kershaw capture it all with a great deal of flair—a sustained close-up of Celeste as she swirls away during one of her classes is a standout, as are the images of Enzo on an off-shore oyster farm and the joyful recreations of Jules et Jim and Bonnie and Clyde during the directors’ 8mm diversions.
If one thing holds it back, it’s a certain lightness to the whole endeavor—always an occupational hazard when fiction and reality are blurred in this way. We know which sections are clearly a fabrication, but it’s the grey areas that rob Burgundy of some impact: if one or two things are clearly staged, you start to wonder, then why believe any of it to be true? With that in mind, best to approach with a grain of salt and maybe a nice charcuterie.
Burgundy premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Burgundy Is a Light and Stylish Journey Into the World of Wine first appeared on The Film Stage.
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