An audience favourite at festivals, Blind Ambition ticks all the boxes for a feelgood underdog documentary, but the film’s popularity rests on more than dramatic clichés and familiar tropes about competitive spirit. It reflects a multi-faceted tale of refugees, urban violence and the eurocentrism of tasting (e.g. requiring a familiarity with strawberries), as much as a shared love of wine and a desire to make the folks back home proud. 

Far from being a band of brothers, the four South African-based sommeliers who come together to form the Zimbabwean wine tasting team in the “Sommelier Olympics” had not known each other in their home country. What they had in common was a desperate urge to leave Zimbabwe after its hyperinflation crisis of 2008, but also a desperate longing for the country of their birth which they channel into flag-waving patriotism.

While their testimonies of terrifying people-smuggling and heart-warming good fortune are front and centre, the film does a good job of pointing at the tensions and inequities of South African society visible in the background, and the different tensions the team face when they encounter the “Old World” of French viniculture embodied by the eccentric Denis Garret (“He will surely be played by Gérard Depardieu in the feature remake”, said the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw).

“Communicating the sheer sensory difficulty of blind tasting through a visual and auditory medium is certainly a challenge, but talking heads, such as Jancis Robinson MW, go some way to explaining just how skilful blind tasters have to be to succeed.” Louis Thomas, The Drinks Business

“What gives this familiar underdog story its satisfying emotional weight is the care that the film-makers take in tracing the journeys of Joseph, Pardon, Tinashe and Marlvin from desperate migrants to skilled sommeliers in some of South Africa’s top restaurants.” Wendy Ide, The Observer