Bottle Shock, 2008
- Original title: Bottle Shock
- Year: 2008
- Genre: comedy, drama
- Director: Rendall Miller
- Cast: Bill Pullman, Chris Pine, Freddi Rodriguez, Dennis Farina, Alan Rickman, Eliza Dushku
- Plot: The film is based on a true story. In 1976, a small American winery made a splash at a wine competition in France. Their wine won the blind tasting competition, making California a world-renowned wine supplier.
Plot
Sommelier and wine shop owner Steven Spurrier, a British expatriate living in Paris, is concerned with how to save his business in his daily conversation with Maurice, a wine lover from Milwaukee who is Spurrier’s regular (sometimes only) customer. He concocts a plan to hold a blind taste-test intended to introduce Parisians to the quality wines coming from elsewhere in the world.
Spurrier travels to the not-yet-famous Napa Valley in search of contestants for his Judgment of Paris taste test, where a chance meeting introduces him to founding vintner Jim Barrett of Chateau Montelena. Barrett wants no part in it, believing it to be a set-up designed by the French to humiliate New World wine producers. Barrett’s son, Bo, secretly passes Spurrier a couple of bottles of the Chateau’s chardonnay for the competition. Comely and nonconformist university graduate student Sam Fulton arrives at Chateau Montelena seeking an internship, and is promptly put to work while stirring up interest among Bo and vineyard foreman Gustavo Brambila.
Due to reductionist techniques in wine making (the absence/reduction of oxygen during the wine making process), the chardonnay has turned brown in the bottles, causing Barrett Sr. to call for the whole vintage to be carted away for dumping. But Bo discovers the brown color is only temporary and races back home. On the way back to Chateau Montelena, however, Bo’s truck runs out of gas, forcing him and Sam to find someone to help them out. After several unsuccessful attempts on Bo’s part, Sam takes over and gets a driver (who turns out to be a police officer) to pull over by exposing her breasts. Even though she could get arrested for indecent exposure, the officer agrees to help them out. Bo eventually manages to recover the vintage, thanks to the help of local bar owner Joe who had intercepted the bottles on the way to the dump, intending to recycle the bottles.
Bo is asked to travel to Paris to represent the Napa Valley vintners at the contest. After tallying the scores from the eight Parisian judges, Spurrier is shocked to find that Montelena’s Chardonnay has won the competition.
The report is featured in an article of Time; restaurants and wine shops all around America are asked continuously for the wine (Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 1973) and forced to admit that they do not have it. This twist of fate and the resultant oenological epiphany forever changes the fortunes of Napa Valley wineries and the global wine industry as a whole, as it is revealed that French wines are in fact not unbeatable.
In the end, the futures of the characters are revealed: Jim Barrett continues to make wine into his 80s, although Bo now runs the winery. A bottle of Montelena Chardonnay 1973 and the red wine, Stags Leap cabernet sauvignon 1973, also from California, that had won the same competition were given a display case at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2006, thirty years after the first competition, Steven Spurrier hosted another contest, this time with full confidence that French wine would win. California won again.
