Pick any day of the year at random and you can bet it will be National Whatever Day for any number of things, and some of them are just straight-up ridiculous. For instance, on May 20, there are 15 of ‘em, including streaming day, pick-your-own strawberries day, and juice slush day.
For May 25, there is (Queen) Victoria Day, towel day (yes, towel day), world thyroid day (what?!), and (tah-dah!) wine day.
There aren’t a ton of wine-related features fewer than 50. Most of them are a waste of time, or they’re too elitist and stuffy. But a good handful of them are excellent.
Cheers and bottoms up!
‘Sideways’ (2004)
The “Citizen Kane” of wine movies, “Sideways” mercilessly skewers wine “experts,” in this case, teacher and would-be novelist Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti).
Miles has agreed to be the best man at an upcoming wedding for his buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a once-popular voice-over artist who is always on the prowl. Jack’s “bachelor party” is a week-long tour of Napa Valley, where the pair plays golf, does some wine tastings, and chats up the local ladies.
A comedy of errors ensues, thus cementing director and co-writer Alexander Payne’s (“The Descendants,” “Election”) reputation of being his generation’s premier, commercially viable satirist.
“Sideways” was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Church), Supporting Actress (Virginia Madsen), and it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
‘Bottle Shock’ (2008)
Based on actual events (read: a great deal of it is fiction), this sneakily subversive dramatic comedy takes dead aim at wine snobs and French culture. It is set at the 1976 “Judgment at Paris” international wine competition.
Alan Rickman stars as Steven Spurrier, a British expat living in Paris operating a failing high-end wine store. At the urging of an American customer, Spurrier organizes a blind taste test pitting French wines against the (then upstart) Napa Valley vintages.
Bill Pullman and Chris Pine co-star as father and son Napa vintners who work in tandem with Spurrier (for polar opposite reasons) to prove that not only are American wines just as good as those from France, they might actually be better.
‘Somm’ (2012)
“Somm” is short for “sommelier,” a chef de vin or wine steward. This highly entertaining and informative documentary gets dangerously close to glib puffery on more than one occasion but never quite goes there.
The movie follows four candidates and their families as each prepares for the incredibly difficult and prestigious “Master Sommelier” exam. How difficult is it? It has one of the lowest culinary pass rates in the world. Since its creation nearly five decades ago, the Court of Master Sommeliers has passed fewer than 200 candidates out of a field that averages about 100 per year or about half of 1 percent.
“Somm” was followed by two sequels, a TV series, and an entire network (Somm TV) exclusively airing food and beverage-related programming.
‘Sour Grapes’ (2016)
This riveting crime documentary focuses on the infamous Indonesian fraudster Rudy Kurniawan who was to the wine world what Bernie Madoff was to finance.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Kurniawan (born Zhen Wang Huang) convincingly ingratiated himself into the hoity-toity, upper crust wine collecting community. Displaying a level of wine knowledge through an ultra-slick huckster’s pompous air, Kurniawan impressed a copious number of obscenely wealthy collectors.
Like many con artists before him, Kurniawan began by selling legit rare vintages. Yet, by the middle of the decade he started offering even rarer wines that, in reality, didn’t exist. According to the movie, over 10,000 of Kurniawan’s counterfeit bottles still remain in private collections.
‘Widow Clicquot’ (2023)
In this biographical period piece, Haley Bennett (“Hillbilly Elegy,” “Cyrano”) stars as Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot who, in 1804 at the age of 20, inherited her late husband’s fledgling winery (after the subsequent death of his brother).
At the time, Napoleonic laws prohibited women from not only owning businesses, but earning any kind of monetary-based living. Widows were excluded from this restriction.
Clicquot operated “under the radar” and against the wishes of her former father-in-law (Ben Miles) and every other “expert.” She was able to smuggle some bottles of her new creation, vintage rose champagne, into Russia. The reception of this new wine was overwhelmingly positive and the company bearing her name burgeoned and continues to this day.
Forget for a second that Clicquot was a woman. Simply recognize just how integral she was as a person who created a perennially popular product in highly restrictive times that forever, against all odds, transformed the ancient fermentation industry.
All titles are available on assorted streaming services. For options, visit Just Watch.
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