The French winemaker Rolland, the "Spielberg of wine," leaves us at the age of 78.

Michel Rolland, internationally renowned French oenologist and consultant for hundreds of wineries around the world, has passed away in Bordeaux at the age of 78. The family announced that the death occurred due to a heart attack.

Originally from the heart of Libournais and belonging to a lineage of winemakers, Rolland was trained at the University of Bordeaux's oenology faculty.

In the 1970s, he began his consulting career in the Bordeaux region, later expanding it globally, becoming the reference for the so-called “flying winemaker”, with clients from California to Argentina.

Nicknamed the “Spielberg of wine” by American director and sommelier Jonathan Nossiter, he was close to the famous American critic Robert Parker and contributed to the international spread of Bordeaux wines. At the same time, some observers attributed to him a tendency towards the homogenization of taste, oriented towards more woody and structured profiles.

“Parker changed the global wine landscape with an approach to tasting that no one had before. He devised a scoring system, perhaps criticized, but it is the only one that works,” Rolland stated on the occasion of the release of his book “Le Gourou du Vin” in 2012, adding that Bordeaux “should erect a statue for him or name a square after him”.

Rolland's media notoriety peaked in 2004 with his appearance in “Mondovino”, the documentary by Nossiter that investigates the globalization of tastes and wine production.