Bottle Shock (movie)
This is the 2008 film of the Judgement of Paris which I recently reviewed.
It stars Alan Rickman – excellent as he always is – as the wine expert Stephen Spurrier who set up a wine-tasting competition in Paris in which the Californian chardonnay Montelena and Stag’s Head red beat the best of the French vintages.
The movie does stereotype the French as wine snobs and Stephen Spurrier as a rather effete, pompous, Brit.
The Californian wine makers from Napa Valley are hick by contrast: more hippy hillbillies than wine connoisseurs.
Romantic interest is supplied by young intern Sam (Rachel Taylor) falling for Mexican Gustavo, who is to wine what Seve Ballesteros was to golf – a natural – and then for Bo Barrett, the long-haired hippy son of the owner of the Montalena vineyard
Whilst the film sometimes veers off course factually, nonetheless it tells the amazing story reasonably well which led to the invincibility myth of French wine being shattered.
