Wine Film Review (#2) - Bottle Shocked

First off, my friends and I started watching Corked and it was so terrible.  We got through 30 minutes of it and gave up.  I’m very glad we did because Bottle Shocked was a great movie.  It takes place in the late seventies before Napa Valley had its world wide reputation.  The main theme of the movie is the idea of hillbilly, country people in Napa Valley out-wine-making the hoity-toity French.  I loved it because it was so “GO MMUURRIICAA” and even more than that, it was about the underdog winning.  It also perpetuated the idea that wine is for everyone and not just the snobs.  All in all a great movie.  

            The movie takes place in the late 70’s.  It follows a struggling winery owner in Napa Valley and his renegade hippy son.  The other half of the story is a British wine shop owner living in Paris.  When trying to decide how to save his shop, he decides to host a blind wine tasting competition to help introduce Paris to other wines throughout the world.  The story unfolds as the son and his best friend pine (haha get it pine… the actor’s name is Chris Pine) for the beautiful young intern and the father and son relationship is strained.  The father all but gives up on the winery when their Chardonnay is produced with a brown color even though the taste is outstanding.  It turns out that the reason the wine was brown is a type of “bottle shock.”  The chemistry gets a jolt and oxygen interferes with the development process but disappears after time.  The wine they once thought was unsalable, actually was just made so perfectly that it retained the brown color for only a certain amount of time.    

The award winning wine 

The British wine shop owner brings a sampling of the Napa Valley wines back with him and organizes the blind tasting which has come to be known has the 1976 Judgment of Paris.  In a miraculous turn of events, the Napa Valley Chardonnay beats all of the French wines quite to the chagrin of the French wine connoisseur-judges.  The event and the Napa Valley success spreads across the news channels in Europe and America and establishes America as a force to be reckoned with in the wine industry.  It also foreshadows the spread of the wine industry to countries across the globe.              

            The wine setting in this film is of course, Napa Valley.  While the area has been producing quality wine for quite some time, the 1976 wine tasting is really what brought these wines to the fine wine forefront.  Napa Valley has a diversity of viticultrual environments within itself and thus produces many different types of varietal and blended wines.  Since it is located on the northern end of the San Francisco bay, there is a defining mountain range on both the east and the west ends.  These mountain ranges help set some of the flavor because of their “active and eventful geological history.”  The volcanic ash shapes from the past is a major component of the soil in the region.  Also, many tectonic plates have collided in the area so the fault lines have helped shape the terrain.  While Cabs and Chardonnays are what Napa Valley is most known for, they grow all different types of grapes including Merlot, Pinot Noir, Sangiovese, Zinfandel, etc. etc. … you name it.       

Movie Cover 

            The film was shot in Napa Valley and included the winery where the winning Chardonnay was produced.  I thought it was neat to see the actual landscape and terrain throughout the movie.  As far as increasing my wine knowledge, for some reason I was under the impression that California wine has been globally recognized  for like a century, but this movie educated me to the contrary.  Napa Valley is just so synonymous to me with wine that I assumed the region has had this reputation forever.  It was neat to

document the real emergence of wines from non-European countries and I was surprised that they are all so new – like within my lifetime! Just like we talked about in class, wine is becoming more of a household name.  More and more people in every single social setting and walk of life are beginning to drink wine.  It’s not just for the rich and snobby anymore.  It’s for the college kid and the working mom and the mechanic and the CEO… everyone.  Cool stuff.  Makes me like drinking wine even more because it means I’m part of the revolution (and who doesn’t like being of a revolution {get the OAR reference, love them!}).   

mmmm Chris Pine

            I would recommend this movie first to a wine drinker but also to someone who is generally interested in wine.  The movie does a great job at using the language of wine and teaching some background on how it is made.  They could have gone into more detail about the father and son’s jobs and how hard it was for them to grow and process the grapes but that might have made the movie less “masses friendly.” So all in all, I thought it was a great movie and a good, educational use of my time.  Plus Chris Pine is very attractive, even with his hippy hair. 

XOXOVINO, 

LJ