Thank, or blame, Sideways. That critically acclaimed film, which I remember chiefly for the nutty surprise of Virginia Madsen’s poetic disquisition on pinot noir, proved that wine lovers are a legitimate, if small, fragment of a target audience. When I say “fragment,” I mean that we can expect to see mostly independent/small-studio movies, and not too many of them, on similar themes. Francis Ford Coppola, even with his love of the vineyard, is probably not going to stir himself to create a Grapefather trilogy.
Yet Bottle Shock is, surprisingly, only the first of two projected movies on the same topic: The celebrated 1976 “Judgment of Paris,” at which a panel of French wine critics preferred California to French wines in a blind tasting of both chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Disappointingly, Shock turns out to be not so much about the actual tasting as about the triumph of the California winery that provided the winning white. This is a comedic saga of grit and hope, fairly loose with the actual details of history, and spiked with several large dramatic chunks as well as clunky attempts at last-minute suspense. A word often used to describe a wine of elegance and harmony is “finesse.” Bottle Shock has no finesse.
Bill Pullman plays Jim Barrett, the head of Chateau Montalena. And Alan Rickman is Steven Spurrier, the British oeniphile who organized the tasting and picked a Montalena chardonnay for the event. Rickman arrives in sunny California and, with the droll snobbery of fat old Robert Morley, moseys and noses around the area, sampling (and liking) what he finds. He also tastes guacamole, a moment that Rickman turns into a nice little moment: He licks at it like a turtle unsure of a lettuce leaf. Pullman plays Barrett as a man in a permanent wince of emotional pain: As the tasting nears, he thinks (wrongly) that his vintage is bad, despairs that the whole winery is a tragic waste, and berates (and boxes!) his easygoing son (Chris Pine), who looks like an Armani model playing one of the Altman brothers. Pullman is a realistic actor, and he makes much of the Barrett family side of the story play out with the crabbed misery of a John Steinbeck novel. Actually, he’s even more unpleasant than Paul Giamatti was in Sideways. And that’s saying something.
Bottle Shock is more about a victory of character than a victory of wine.
