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.
This reissue of three slim Kingsley Amis books from the publisher Bloomsbury isn’t strictly speaking a great boon to wine drinkers. Its chief value, apart from terrifically sharp humor and compulsive readability, is how it affords a glimpse into the mind of someone who loves booze of any and every kind.
Wine, for Amis, is merely one more character in an alcoholic narrative full of mixed drinks, liquors, liqueurs and ales. In terms of the liveliness and scope of the book’s catalog of drinks, Everyday Drinking is almost Dickensian. It is instructive, if you are a wine-lover with romantic feelings about structure, viniculture and the like—I myself am especially fond of rhapsodizing how a wine’s color captures and toys with the light—to remember that there are many people who consider such things pretentious and time wasting. Amis knows wine and its rituals well, but they are certainly not something he writes about with any enthusiasm:
Hit your wine merchant across the mouth when, innocently trying to put you on to a good thing, or what he sees as one, he recommends you to “buy for laying down.”
Whatever the men in the know may say, a German wine label is a fearful thing to decipher.
Drink any wine you like with any dish…. The North of England couple I once read about who shared a half-bottle of crème de menthe (I hope it was a half-bottle) to go with their grilled turbot should be inspiration, if not a literal example, to us all.
It is good, wine enthusiast, to realize that this mindset isn’t rare.
The book is at its most fun in chapters on hangover, how to entertain guests while keeping the lion’s share of good booze for yourself (“Mean Sod’s Guide,” it’s called, with a separate entry for the wife, “Mean Slag’s Guide.”), and many recipes on awful-sounding punches and cocktails. Queen Victoria’s Tipple, anyone?
I would add that Amis, for all his humor and apparently prodigious drinking, is not someone who pretends to be a bon vivant, either: He is someone who knows what he is talking about, but I always feel he is speaking from an old leather club chair in a cloud of unfiltered cigarette smoke intermingled with some smoggy ecological mist of black and white and gray. I think he is fundamentally grim, in a post-empire, hungover sort of way. Maybe the hangover was literal. The book is highly recommended, anyway, as something to sip from, learn from and laugh at out loud.
An importer of considerable influence and impeccable taste, Rosenthal is at his finest in this memoir when conjuring up the experience of sampling a new wine. Consider this long passage:
At its best, wine captures and transmits all of the elements of the ambience from which it is born. In the ’61 Chambave, one could smell the skin of the hares that scamper through the vineyards and the gentian and the juniper that fill the surrounding fields; the taste captured the myriad berries, black and red and blue, that grow in abundance on the mountainside; and, lingering in the background, in the aroma, as a supplemental flavor, and in the texture of the tannins, is the stern minerality of the slate-infused soil. We drank and we ate, and now, twenty-seven years later, every second of that experience is with me.
That’s a lovely marriage of romantic pictorialism—those scampering hares, that juniper in the fields—to a sensible, undergirding appreciation of the earth chemistry at work in the wine. It captures the small, happy miracle of wine. The book is less successful at bringing to life the vignerons he has cultivated in developing his renowned business (something doesn’t register—the mix of concrete detail and poetic feeling is off). His prose, when not on the specific topic of wine memories, can get lofty and magisterial and stiff. Wine, he writes near the start, “has invaded my thoughts much as a benign bacterium settles into milk to create pungent cheese.” If he had made his career as a dairy farmer, would he invoke Bordeaux to discuss his love of cheddar? Luckily, at any rate, his sensibility has been for wine.
