A few years before the first Zimbabwe team attended the 2017 World Blind Wine Tasting Championships, “the Olympics of wine tasting”, not one of them had ever tasted the drink. Blind Ambition, released in South Africa on 29 July, is an uplifting underdog documentary profiling the four Cape Town-based sommeliers and making sense of their success in the context of the ongoing refugee crisis.
Australian directors Warwick Ross and Rob Coe pick up the story about a month before the competition.
“During my previous film, Red Obsession, which is also set in the wine world, we interviewed so many people in the business and one of them was Jancis Robinson, probably the first-, second- or third-most famous wine writer in the world. She’s written all these big coffee table books on wine, she’s an expert – writes for the London Times… And she knew I was looking for a subject again, and I didn’t want to make another film until I found the right one,” says Ross.
“One day she contacted us about these four Zimbabwe guys who have an amazing story to tell. Within a day or two, we were Skyping with the guys and it was one of those strange ones where they didn’t quite know who we were or what we really wanted of them.
“We were desperately trying to figure out what the story was in this – the individual stories were amazing, but was there going to be an arc to it? And, of course, they were training for the global competition, the first team Zimbabwe ever to compete, the first full team of colour to ever compete. Three weeks later we were here on the ground in Cape Town with a camera crew. I think they were still pretty unsure what we were on about, but it worked out,” he explains.
Even then, team Zimbabwe sommelier Marlvin Gwese admits that he was sceptical of the Australian directors. “At first, I wasn’t sure if it’s going to happen or not, because regularly we get those calls – Reuters for interviews or some opportunity with ABC. I just saw this as one of those calls and I thought it would die down. But when I felt the energy from them I said, this could be happening. The confirmation for me was only when they actually landed and seeing the cameras arriving,” he says.
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