Bottle shock

Director: Randall Miller
With: Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman
Released: August 8 (US)

Strolling down the Champs Elysées one sunny afternoon in May 1976, foreign correspondent George Taber can have had no idea that he was about to find the material for a book that would one day catch the eye of Hollywood. He was off to cover a wine tasting for Time magazine. A dozen Californian and a handful of French wines were to be judged blind by a panel of eminent sommeliers and critics.

No-one doubted the outcome. The event was simply to assess where the Californians had reached in relation to the benchmark Grands Crus of France in the year of the American bicentenary. It was organised by Steven Spurrier, a pukka young Englishman who ran the nearby Caves de la Madeleine. He had hoped to generate some publicity for his wine shop, though of all the journalists invited, only Taber turned up.

As he wandered among the judges with a list of the actual wines, strange verdicts began to emerge: "Ah, back to France!" sighed one judge as he sipped a Californian Chardonnay. Shocked silence greeted the final result—Stags' Leap Cabernet Sauvignon and Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, both from Napa Valley, took gold.
For the Americans, victory, declared by an all-French jury on their home turf, could not have been sweeter. In France, the reaction was swift: shoot the messenger. The judges received demands for their resignation and even death threats.

The perceived supremacy of French wine was set in stone and based on the sacred tenet of terroir—that combination of soil, climate and elevation that reached perfection in only a few vineyards in Burgundy and Bordeaux. For Taber, the Paris tasting was "a seismic shift because it broke the myth that you could only make great wine in France. That was the conventional wisdom of the time: France made great wine, and everyone else made plonk."

Beyond the boutique wineries of California, which received a mighty confidence boost, the immediate impact was limited. The journalist got his scoop and Steven Spurrier, now consultant editor at Decanter, created a buzz that grew louder with each passing decade. "I re-held the tasting in 1986 in New York, with pretty similar results and got such flak from the Bordeaux chateaux, that I didn't do it again in 1996."
By the time of the next big anniversary in 2006, Taber had written The Judgment of Paris, and Hollywood was beginning to take an interest. Now 32 years after the event, the story has hit the big screen. Bottle Shock, which opened in US cinemas this August, was a "no-brainer" according to co-producer Brenda Lhomer, who describes it as a "true underdog tale".

The script was re-tooled "to make it more dramatically appealing to a wider audience" and shown to Spurrier, who in the film is portrayed (by Alan Rickman) as an absurdly effete English wine snob visiting Chateau Montelena in the heart of hicksville California to gather samples for his tasting. Spurrier considered suing for defamation and tried to remove his name from the film. He says that but for the names of the characters, the wines and the date of the tasting, the screenplay is "pure fiction".

George Taber is equally dismissive and calls it "a cliché-ridden, third-rate film", adding that Spurrier "was and is a very sophisticated wine expert, not Colonel Blimp with a glass of wine." He also points out that Croatian-American winemaker Mike Grgich, who created the winning Chardonnay, barely gets a walk-on part.

There's no official word yet on a UK release date, but it could be early next year. It will be interesting to see what audiences here make of this "underdog tale". Writing in the New York Times, Eric Asimov accused Bottle Shock of taking a "disturbingly jingoistic attitude towards France". And, with its poster of a huge flying bottle dropping bottle-shaped bombs on the Eiffel Tower, he may have a point.

But the plot thickens: there is another Hollywood movie in the works called Judgment of Paris, after Taber's book and scripted by Robert Kamen, whose credits include Lethal Weapon and who has his own Californian winery. "It is based around Warren Winiarski [the winemaker at Stags' Leap] and myself as the major characters in a sort of 'American dream' way," says Spurrier.

This time, Jude Law and Hugh Grant have been touted to play the part of Spurrier, who adds, "It will be a classy movie if it ever gets to the screen. But the general feeling is that one movie, even one of such rubbish as Bottle Shock, about the tasting is perhaps enough." 

Whether or not Judgment of Paris ever appears, there is one final twist to the Taber tale. Chateau Montelena has just been bought by the Cos d'Estournel, a leading Bordeaux producer. Maybe the French knew something all along.

Tom Bruce-Gardyne