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'Bottle Shock': A charming vintage

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

It’s a moment that has become legend in wine-loving circles, the ”Judgment in Paris,“ that miraculous day in 1976 when a panel of snobby French wine experts unwittingly honored American wines over French ones in a blind taste test. It shocked the wine world and put Napa Valley on the map, setting the stage for the pre-eminence of California wines. Without the judgment, we’d have no Sideways.

Bottle Shock is an utterly charming version of that story, a film about the ”hicks in the sticks“ of rural California, people just as committed to good wine making and terroir (the land grapes are grown in) as the French but resigned to never getting credit for it.

The wine-tasting was the brainchild of Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a British ex-pat selling wines in Paris. When we meet him, he’s the English outsider destined never to fit in among the French. Dennis Farina, funny and out of character, runs the Paris guided-tour operation from an office next door. He talks Spurrier into taking a chance at ”educating“ the world’s most sophisticated wine drinkers. Show them there’s more to wine than the wine regions of France.

Spurrier resolves to scout for California wines, and in America’s bicentennial year, to stage a taste testing calling attention, good or bad, to Napa Valley’s best. No, he won’t be visiting Gallo.

Meanwhile, in that valley, the vintners are struggling. Jim Barrett of Chateau Montelena (Bill Pullman) and his mop-topped ladies’-man son, Bo (Chris Pine), are winemaker come-latelies facing financial ruin. Their veteran field hand Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez) secretly makes a great wine of his own, but he can’t come out and say so. The new intern (Rachael Taylor, in ’70s Farrah hair and cut-off jeans) is a mild distraction for Gustavo and Bo. So is the local bar owner (Eliza Dushku), who runs a honky-tonk filled with wine makers, wine lovers and wine experts.

Naturally, Chateau Montelena is the first place Spurrier stumbles into. The locals are so green they don’t know to charge for wine tastings. Some even suspect that the Brit is setting them up for a little Bicentennial humiliation. But as Jim says, ”If one succeeds, we all succeed.“ The locals sign on, and the battle is joined.

The great pleasures of this small-scale dramedy include Napa scenery and the way Rickman savors it as he chews it up. His plummy way with a line has rarely been put to better use. The man’s demeanor says ”snob,“ never more so than when he’s diving into his first bucket of KFC. And wine tastings? Nobody spits like Rickman.

”The smell of the vineyard, like inhaling birth.“

Director Randall Miller (Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School) shot a bit too much filler — too many scenes of pickups traveling down dusty Napa Valley roads — but he keeps the tone light and the camera in close, letting the obvious laughs and assorted feel-good moments pay off.

Bottle Shock (the phrase comes from wine that’s been shipped improperly) sits easily on the palate, a winning remembrance of a moment when wine awareness finally took hold in a country too willing to play the unsophisticated rube for too long.