I just finished a five-week long intensive online course in Social Media, and as usual, after a bout of studying, I relaxed with a couple of movies. And, since I’m unemployed now, I checked out the one-dollar tier. Watching Bottle Shock, directed by Randall Miller (2008), took me to California wine country, Napa Valley, specifically, and its rolling hills braided with vines.
This movie is not particularly suspenseful or action-oriented. It’s no chase-‘em-down movie shoot-‘em-up flick. But it did impose a satisfactory story of relationships and character development upon the framework of a real event. And, it exudes an aura of central California during the mid-70’s that is fun for those of us who came of age then. Woodstock was six-years ago, Jim (Bill Pullman) tells his son Bo (Chris Pine), whom he is chastising for sleeping with a girl whose last name Bo can’t give. It’s only one wake-up call for Bo, whose coming-of-age story is intertwined with his father’s success story. Once the father achieves an award-winning vintage, his own feelings of inadequacy are dispelled and they both end up proud, and owners of one of the top-producing wineries in California.
This movie is based on actual events, for in 1976, a British wine enthusiast, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), brought French wine to its knees by holding a blind wine-tasting event using top-French wine tasters, in which the Napa Valley Chateau Montelena 1973 Chardonnay took first place. The contest, which would come to be known as the Judgment of Paris, changed not only the way the world regarded California wines, it changed world wine. Everybody got in the game at that point. French wine was no longer considered by those in the know as the only good wine in the world. The documentary/promotional bit that makes this claim also interestingly features the actual Chateau Montelena owners explaining how the grapes are tended and the wine is produced.
It’s a bit of armchair travel to central California wine country on an evening when it isn’t otherwise possible to feast eyes on that gorgeous landscape, tour a winery, and indulge in a bit of wine tasting. Movies certainly take second place to real life, but one can dream. Wine is, after all, sunlight held together by water, Jim tells Bo.
