Bottle Shock
by Chris Knipp

In dim far off times, more specifically 32 years ago, when young California men like Bo Bennett (Chris Pine) wore tight jeans with flared bottoms and had long unruly hair, before there were Liberty Fries or 9/11, there were wine snobs. And they tended to think that French wine was light years above all other wine. Then, in 1976, something happened to vindicate California wine makers dramatically. A blind tasting competition was held just outside Paris, judged by a group representing some of the most prestigious French restaurants, wine organizations, and wine publications--and California wines won, in both categories, white and red. Now, in 2008, there are wine snobs. And they tend to think that French wine is light years above all other wine. But California wine makers have a confidence in the quality of their production that they didn't have before that historic blind tasting.

But my mild irony here isn't quite in the spirit of Bottle Shock, a film by Randall Miller, which seeks to present a wholly upbeat feel-good narrative. Beware, this is a movie that operates principally in the land of myth, where details are shifted to make a jauntier, tidier story. Bottle Shock isn't by any stretch a great film.

Bottle Shock works best if you look on its overdrawn characters, who have nothing of the depth of Sideways, as mere window dressing for the "historical" narrative--an attitude which, luckily, the story-arc justifies. The virtue of the film is that it's not about the people so much as about limousin oak, tapping casks, wine color, the wine-maker's art--and the most educated palates of France revealing that when they couldn't see the label, they found wine from the Napa Valley second to none. To trample on the movie's celebration of that triumph--even if its tone is a bit jingoistic-- would be rather unkind, especially if you're writing an hour's drive from where most of the action happens.

The story focuses on an English wine merchant named Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) who sets up the tasting, and the Bennett family, Bo and his father Jim (Bill Pullman), whose Chateau Montelena vineyard won the white wine part of the tasting with their 1973 chardonnay. Stag's Leap's '73 Cab won for the reds, but there's nothing about it--or about Montelena's winemaker, Mike Grgich, who, it's reported, opted to be left out of the screenplay (he was originally to have been played by Danny DeVito). There's also Bennett's most knowledgeable employee, a young cellar rat of Mexican descent, born and bred in the winefields, Gustavo Brambila (Freddy Rodriguez, last seen in Grindhouse). His palate is so keen he can unfailingly spot not only the variety and label, be it Californian or French, but the vintage of any glass he's given to taste. Gustavo works for Jim Bennett, but he and the Callas-loving Mr. Garcia (Miguel Sandoval) have secretly been producing a limited bottling of their own, which is so good it makes Gustavo cry and instantly persuades Montelena's lovely girl intern Sam (Rachael Taylor) to jump into bed with him in a cabin perched on a promontory with vineyards all around it. There's no explanation why Sam switches her affections to Bo later--except that it suits the plot. Poor Gustavo is a pawn in a stereotyping game as the token Latino.

Alan Rickman often plays a villain, but this time he's the good guy, the catalyst, albeit a sourpuss (the Rickman default mode), who initially expects nothing of American wine but then is won over. "Why don't I like you?" Bennett senior says to Spurrier. "Because you think I"m an asshole," says Suprrier(Rickman.) "I'm not really. I'm just British and....not like you." It seems far-fetched that Spurrier is a wine merchant in Paris, especially given Rickman's shaky French, frequently on display in the French scenes (all shot, incidentally, in Napa and Sonoma). Also far-fetched is that next door to his Paris business is a loudly dressed American called Maurice (Dennis Farina) who's in the hired car business. The Brits were prominent in wine tasting in those days (before Robert Parker of Monkton, Maryland came to dominate the field) but an English vintner, in Paris? Well, it's true, but the real Spurrier threatens legal action against this film. He says it is full of unflattering falsifications and represents him as "an impossibly effete snob," and he supports a rival film version of the events The Judgment of Paris, still in the development stage.

If I were the real Bo Bennett I doubt I'd want to be represented as he is in the movie, and in fact the real Bo at the Chateau Montelena premiere got a good laugh, a Wine Spectator article says, by declaring "I never really did any of that shit." Pine is winning nonetheless, Taylor is pretty and fresh, and Pullman, doing his best with a woefully over-dramatized part, is flinty and tough. Freddie Rodriguez's character makes cliched speeches like, "You have to have it in your blood. You have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails and the smell of the grape in the air that you breathe."

This movie is trying to appeal to a wider audience--American, I guess. Would French people want to watch this? Not too likely. The "Paris Tasting" or "Judgment of Paris" as American wine writers call it, can't mean much to the French (nothing good!). Sometimes the way a bottle of wine is handled in the movie by alleged wine experts is clumsy and callous.

The title event--in which Bennett almost destroys 500 cases because his chardonnay turns brown in bottle ("bottle shock")--but then returns to gold and miraculously is saved for the "Judgment"--may be invented. It seems like a screenwriter's way of jazzing things up that might have gone flat at the crucial moment.

An irony is that Chateau Montelena has just been purchased by Cos d'Estornel, one of the most prominent Bordeaux vineyards. So who wins in the end? And while California wine has grown in sophistication, complexity, and reputation since, French wine prices have gone through the roof and French wine-making, as chronicled by Parker, has become more consistent. But worldwide competition is forcing inferior French wine producers out of business

Another film on this subject based on a book by George M. Taber is in the planning stages. It promises to be more accurate. Let's hope it's also a better film--and has as good a cast.

©2008 Chris Knipp
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