Not exactly a true vintage
In the spring of 1976, Gerald Ford was in the White House, the federal minimum wage was $2.30 an hour, and Perrier water had just made its appearance here. Americans were looking forward to their bicentennial celebration, and a Paris-based British wine-trade professional named Steven Spurrier was busy organizing a blind tasting of French and California wines - an event aimed at highlighting advances in American winemaking over the last couple of decades. When that "Judgment of Paris" was over, two California wines from the Napa Valley had bested all challengers. On hearing the stunning results, Jim Barrett, part-owner of Chateau Montelena, whose chardonnay won the white-wine competition, is said to have quipped, "Not bad for kids from the sticks."
He was joking, of course. Barrett, who came to Napa in 1972, was a wealthy law partner from Southern California who was anything but a hick. But Randall Miller, who has directed and co-written a new movie based on the Paris tasting, has decided to tell the story as if Barrett's remark were gospel. This artifice is the founding myth of "Bottle Shock," a film that casts so golden a glow over the Napa Valley wine business it might have been storyboarded by the Vintner's Association. As in "Sideways," whose 2005 success the Randall film was surely designed to replicate, it isn't really wine that's front and center here so much as a host of shopworn narrative-anchoring tropes: father-son rivalry; nobody believed we could do it; implausible last-minute rescue; the drama (yawn) of romantic competition. "High Noon" with hints of "Rocky."
In the film, Spurrier (the excellent Alan Rickman) is barely making it as a wine educator and retailer in Paris when he conceives the idea of promoting himself and his business by arranging the contest. Egged on by Maurice, the chatty, loudly dressed American who runs the shop next door (pompadour-sporting Dennis Farina), Spurrier heads off to Napa to sample the local wares, where he encounters various Valley characters including Barrett's wastrel son Bo (Chris Pine), who is proud of the wine made on the property but not really committed to following his dad (Bill Pullman) into the challenging work of managing Montelena.
Bo, pal Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez), and most everyone else here is besotted - who wouldn't be? - with the beautiful Sam (Tasmanian actress Rachael Taylor), who has come to Montelena to intern. While Jim and Bo work out their mixed-up feelings toward each other in a jury-rigged outdoor boxing ring and Gustavo beds Sam in a field hands' shed, Spurrier doggedly visits one property after another in his rented AMC Hornet. He buys up barrel samples and introduces himself to the pleasures of fresh guacamole. When in a cafe, as the quality of what he's tasting begins to sink in, he murmurs, "This California wine . . . is so good," a saucy waitress flings back, "What did you expect - Thunderbird?"
Once back in Paris (the tasting of a dozen California wines against eight French was actually held in the courtyard of the Intercontinental Hotel, while in the film the venue is distinctly countrified), the anti-French sentiment flows thick as creme fraiche and twice as acid. Bo's honest-frontiersman-meets-effete-courtiers act couldn't recall Ben Franklin's first appearance at Versailles more emphatically if they had stuck a coonskin cap on his head.
As far as we can tell, the film does get the names of all nine official tasters right - all of them French and each a bona-fide gastronomic star, including Raymond Oliver of the restaurant Le Grand Vefour and Odette Kahn, then editor of Revue du Vin de France, the country's premier wine monthly.
This punctiliousness becomes downright suspicious, however, when you realize that aside from a brief postscript, this film avoids all mention of other California properties that made their bones that day. Neither Stag's Leap Wine Cellars nor its winemaker Warren Winiarski figures in any scene, despite the fact that their cabernet carried away the laurels in the red wine competition - an arguably greater achievement than Montelena's. Nor does European-born winemaker Mike Grgich receive so much as a howdy-do here, though it was he, not Jim Barrett, who vinified those 800 cases of Montelena's prize-winning chardonnay. Lots of wine people think Winiarski and Grgich are the real heroes of '76. It's gaffes like this that make you want to ask for a do-over.
And guess what - we're getting one. The real Spurrier and journalist George Taber have joined forces with screenwriter Mark Kamen to offer what amounts to a second sample from this barrel. The "Judgment of Paris," a film based on Taber's 2006 book of the same name (Taber was the only journalist present at the original event and wrote the story for Time magazine that included the immortal line "California defeated all Gaul") is said to be in production now. One can only hope it sets the record straight on the roles played by Winiarski and Grgich. As for being a better movie, it can't really miss on that score - considering the competition, I mean.
A footnote: Chateau Montelena was sold in July - to those pesky French, of all people, who seem to have decided that if they can't beat the hicks, they might as well buy them out. 