F for Fake is Orson Welles' 1973 documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory, if that is indeed his name. De Hory could spin a tale. He lied about his name, his age, his upbringing, and his police record. His entire existence was pretty much fabricated out of thin air. His hopes of making a living as an artist during the Great Depression indicate that he wasn't too sharp a tool in the first place. Oh, but he figured out how to make art pay. Turn it into crime.
It has been burned into our consciousness that crime itself does not pay. That's debatable. Welles has Clifford Irving as one of the people describing de Hory's life, which is a neat trick. Irving was the author of the supposed autobiography of Howard Hughes, a bit of deceit for which he spent time behind prison bars. Welles himself was a master faker with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. That Halloween staple was created from fake news, back before the term had been co-opted to mean "uncomfortable truths."
Turns out F for Fake is fake itself, with Welles turning the documentary genre on its head. He creates a fictional story from real events, you know, like filmmakers do. Martin Scorsese borrowed the technique for his Rolling Thunder Revue movie.
There's a company called Faux Wines which sells non-alcoholic wines for about the same price as a mid-range regular wine. Does that sound like a deal to you? Isn't non-alcoholic wine just called grape juice? Infamous wine-forger Rudy Kurniawan would probably beg to differ. Check out the doc Sour Grapes for his story.
For F for Fake let's pair an actual wine, as far as we know. Could any wine from Forge Cellars be called a forgery? If we wanted to get cute, I suppose so. But this winery in New York's Finger Lakes region, Lake Seneca to be precise, specializes in real, honest-to-goodness Riesling in the $25 range.
With news you can trust, I guess, there is American Movie. The 1999 documentary follows Mark Borchardt as he tries to raise money to make a film. The task is made harder by the Midwesterner's incompetence and various personal problems. It's hailed as a hilarious picture, although I think some of the humor would be lost on anyone who has tried to get a film financed.
The story told by the doc is true, and it's rather heartwarming, in addition to being pretty funny. When Borchardt's one pet project falls apart, he bounces to another in an effort to raise money to finish the first one. When you hear the phrase "the truth hurts," you might think of American Movie.
The film won a documentary award at Sundance and is listed by the New York Times as one of the thousand greatest movies ever made. That may sound like an easy list to make, but some of my favorite movies aren't on it.
Borchardt is from Wisconsin, and so is our wine pairing. Wollersheim Winery is run by a winemaker who escaped Beaujolais for the cold, American midwest. The Wollersheim wines focus on the Marechal grape, which is more like a Côtes du Rhône than a Pinot Noir. It sells for about $25.
The Italian documentary, Mondo Cane, was considered shocking back in 1962. Its depiction of different cultures from around the globe exposed audiences to a pastiche of perversion, a smorgasbord of sensationalism, a wide world of weirdness. The depictions of racism and cruelty are still hard to watch today. However, many of the scenes were staged or taken out of context to provide maximum titillation.
The film was so popular around the world that others followed in its exploitative footsteps. The genre of sensationalist pseudo-docs is now known as mondo films. The shock effect goes further than blending Sangiovese with Cabernet Sauvignon. How dare you! And you call yourself a Super Tuscan.
The Antinori Solaia is such a super wine, blending Cabernets Sauvignon and Franc with Sangiovese. Artificial Intelligence tells me that Solaia translates from Italian as "loft," or "attic," or "sunny vineyard." Or it could be a typo. I love the AI adventure. These grapes grow in soils which originated in the Pliocene period. That may not matter much to you, but when you pay $350 for a bottle of wine, you expect all the bragging rights that go with it.
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