My favorite part of all this is that Giamatti’s character actually loves Merlot, it’s just that he’s adverse to drinking it because it reminds him of his ex-Wife. The Chateau Petrus that the two had saved (that he ultimately drinks out of a fast food cup at the end) is a 100% Merlot wine. Your average movie-goer and wine-drinker doesn’t know that context, and so all they remember is “I am not drinking any f*cking Merlot!”
[Edit: others were kind enough to remind me that the saved wine is actually Cheval Blanc, a 55-40-5 Cab Franc, Merlot, and Cab Sauv blend. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought out talked about this movie.]
Funny, I've always been a pinot noir guy. I never watched the film, but I would've turned 21 roughly five years after this movie came out, and now I can't help but wonder whether my preference for Pinot was influenced by this movie and how it affected the quality and quantity of wines that were available to me as I started drinking it. Would I have preferred Merlot if this movie had never come out or if I was older, and I'd been around when quantities of Merlot were roughly equal to pinot? An interesting counterfactual.
What many people miss is that it is not about the grape varietal, but the intersection of varietal and geography. Every famous wine region will produce poor wine from varietals not suited to that region, and varietals are sensitive to the local environment. This is where I think the Europeans get it right. They don't focus on the varietal, they produce a blend from varietals that make sense in the region they are grown, producing a wine with somewhat unique characteristics (modulo production skill).
Merlot can be the basis for excellent wine (see: Petrus). However, I think California generally produces mediocre merlot. California's strengths are Cabernet (Sauvignon and Franc) and Zinfandel. For Pinot Noir, there are a couple spots like the Russian River Valley that do a good job, but Oregon has a stronger claim.
In the US, you kind of need to know what varietals grow well in what regions. In Europe, they typically produce varietal blends that are optimized for the region where they are produced, but which have very different characteristics depending on the region. I prefer the European model of branding on the region rather than the varietal, because the wine experience is more consistent and predictable. You know it will usually be an appropriate varietal for the region in which it is produced. That is not always the case in the US; we seem to grow any varietal anywhere if we think we can sell it.
That said, if you want to look smart about wine without spending a ton of money, the best choice is something from a region relatively few people have heard of, and therefore inexpensive, that nonetheless produces brilliant wine. Sommeliers often appreciate people that can identify those hidden gems on the list because people trying to be flashy don't even recognize them. Of course, you learn this by drinking wine from literally everywhere, and especially places you've never heard of, until you form an opinion. Availability varies widely with geography but in 2021, with the globalization of wine, there is little reason to spend much more than $10-20 bottle (retail, not restaurant) for almost any style if you know your regions and quality is the sole objective (local availability notwithstanding).
But then, I'm just a random wine drinker on the Internet. :-)
Not really, there's some basic information in what is popular - say Sauvignon Blanc in NZ or Zweigelt in Austria, but that doesn't mean these need to be the best regions in terms of taste.
Generally, some grapes do better with sun and warmth, while others (like Pinot Noir or Riesling) do better in moderate climate.
Beyond that, I am not sure if one can trust a simple list.
I think this is because region can be very narrowly defined - sometimes "side of this hill, vs. that side". Then, each year also produces different quality.
I think there are certain prototypes per region that you could learn about. But even that is a challenge.
So for France, for example, the regions you want to learn don't stack hierarchically in a nice fashion (like you start with 4 broad regions and break them down). But it can be done.
In realiy, however, different wines are made in each region (see "region" above) so you are not guaranteed to get something like the prototype, nor can you guarantee that the wines of a given year will be like the prototype at all.
Another good example is Italy, which has fewer prototypical examples one might be able to learn. But then, Italy also has a great number of wine makers that do something very different, sometimes something better, so again it doesn't help you find a good wine.
Best bet is to pick a region and really get into it. Like, learning stuff about Bordeaux can keep you busy, but at least you'll have a solid idea.
The wrong approach would be to do stuff like say: "oh Bordeaux has Merlot, while Germany has Pinot" which is sort of true in ratios of averages, but individually, and also generally, incredibly wrong.
I personally believe that identifying a good wine in all cases basically requires you to know about the wine maker and the year. I.e. - it's a full time job.
Love the comment! I honestly think California's most interesting wines being produced now are Syrah's. Crazy good stuff there made by the newer generations.
Agreed on Cabernet Sauvignon. Regarding Pinot Noir, there's just nothing in the US that compares to a good Burgundy, some things I think are interesting are Domaine De La Cote in California and Kelley Fox in Oregon though :)
Try wines from Paso when you can. They are available at the sub-25 price point at most places that sell wine (warehouse, grocery, et al), and you might appreciate the GSM and Syrahs from Paso. Same story in Washington; the strong heat in the growing areas leads to great tannic structure and complexity.
You’re painting with a very broad brush regarding California wine. Some simple numbers:
- Napa & Sonoma counties collectively have 650+ wineries.
- Paso Robles and the extended SLO county (plus Santa Barbara) region have 500+ wineries.
Saying that just the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc are standouts, the latter of which is rarely at 80+% because it is harder to tame in a bottle, by approximately 1150 wineries that produce all manner of Bourdeaux and Rhone varietals is quite reductive.
Oregon Pinots are good if that’s what you like: earthly, terroir-driven taste. California wines are fruitier, part of this is the fruit and the other is the limited use of whole cluster fermentation.
Washington is emerging as a fantastic wine producing state as well.
So, on balance, there is something for every palate produced by California wineries. Maybe even Washington producers. Oregon wineries are getting into Syrah and the darker reds as well.
I agree with your $10-20 range for a decent bottle of wine (retail). What I’d add to your statement is that you shouldn’t need to buy a bottle not produced in the USA if you live here. The locally made wine compares to international options, especially in the targeted price range ($10-20).
In my experience northern California is fruitier. Paso is jammier, though I've not had that many. Santa Barbara area is starting to do some cabs just to north (Happy Canyon) in the hot area. They have less fruity wine the colder you get to the west.
That said, if you want to look smart about wine without spending a ton of money, the best choice is something from a region relatively few people have heard of, and therefore inexpensive, that nonetheless produces brilliant wine.
How is this possible in the Internet age? I mean, I've always liked Dolcetto d'Alba (I know, Piemonte is a well known region, but not for this wine), but in the 10s, there were a few popular articles talking about how it's such a great pizza & pasta wine, and all of a sudden, bottles were more expensive...
So funny story, a week ago my fiancee had a work trip to Serbia. There she discovered that the country produces sublime wine. Brought back a suitcase full of it and every one of them has been amazing.
Neither of us had heard anything about Serbian wines or that they had any wine production nor that it's really good.
So I'd say there are ton of interesting regions to be discovered.
At a past job I went to Serbia several times and the wine was fantastic. I took a pic of a few of the bottles but could never find them responsibly priced in the US.
There are still biases against new world wines. But its really about finding a something you really like from a less known region. Everyone has preferences, so find one that matches yours.
That said its often hard to find those. I like red wines from the regions near Capetown, SA. You can get some of it in big wine stores, but its hard.
Wine region popularity is substantially driven by marketing and fashion. The number of regions in the world that produce excellent wines are legion; most people have only heard or experienced the most famous and well-marketed. It is difficult to overstate just how expansive the wine producing world is, and most don't export much because there is no market for wines from non-trendy locales.
I have experienced wines I discovered when they were inexpensive become trendy and therefore expensive. I've always just moved on; you'll never run out of obscure wine-producing regions that produce excellent inexpensive wine. The largest practical limit is distribution, but wine has become much more global.
You will find a lot of good wine in countries you might not expect e.g. white wine in Mexico. Many countries that produce superior wine almost never export, such as Switzerland. There are excellent small appellations even in France with brilliant wine that everyone ignores because few people have ever heard of them, so it costs very little if you can find it. Smaller countries in Europe are always at a disadvantage regardless of their wine quality e.g. Portuguese and Spanish wine are very similar in quality and style but Spanish wine commands the higher price.
There isn't nearly as much information about wine on the Internet as you may hope. Absent a substantial marketing effort, it largely isn't discoverable virtually. Even in cases where countries like Uruguay attempt to market their wines, it has minimal visibility to the wine drinking world.
It is an inefficient market with incentives that don't necessarily ensure the best wines for the money are easy to find.
I've been told that wine making in Temecula (inland SoCal) didn't really take off at first because they were growing varietals typical to France, and the results weren't too good. They eventually switched to varietals more typical of Italy (which better matches the local conditions) and found more success.
Yeah it's better to be an enthusiast than a connoisseur. I like pretty much all wine that isn't just bargain swill. They're all great in different ways.
The burger joint was in real life “Orcutt Burgers” in Santa Maria. At the time the movie came out, I often visited a friend who lived a block from there, and we ate there regularly. It was a trip to see the movie with him and instantly recognize the restaurant in that scene.
By now the place has probably changed name or owners. It was a pretty good local flavor burger joint at the time.
In the book it was Petrus which is 100% Merlot. They approached the chateau to see if they'd green light the use of Petrus as his unicorn bottle. The chateau refused, and they instead landed on Cheval Blanc.
I've always been left wondering if the "I am not drinking any fucking Merlot" line was a direct result of the snub by Petrus.
The defining feature of Cheval Blanc is the huge amount of Cabernet Franc that goes into the blend, not the Merlot in general... some vintages like the 2011 one have less Merlot than Cabernet Franc. Yes, it's a right bank Bordeaux, but it's by far the most atypical. Petrus for instance is one that I would call primarily a Merlot Right Bank Bordeaux.
This article is a weird bit of serendipity for me as I rewatched this movie over last weekend; having only originally seen Sideways in college nearly 20 years ago. College me didn’t like wine and didn’t even really understand at the time why this movie had such rave reviews.
Now that I’m the age of the characters in the movie I realize that the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie (and also that it’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end.) It’s funny that such a small subplot in a feature film can have a dramatic effect on a major industry like wine making.
My new metric for whether it’s too soon to discuss something: can you uproot a vineyard, plant new vines, wait 5 years for them to grow and then harvest.
Paul Giamatti goes into Virginia Madsen's apartment at the end of the movie and we don't know what happens next. How is it implied that he kills himself?
There are numerous hints dropped throughout the movie that he needs to die to fulfill his role in life, and the directing and storytelling is tight enough that it’s all intentional. Specifically the Confederacy of Dunces references, the phone call asking if the main character in Mile’s novel kills himself, and the “ascension” in the final scene where he is walking up a very sunlit staircase surrounded by flowers.
Yeah, there are references to death and suicide in the movie, like there is in most fiction about depression. But there's nothing explicit about Miles's fate, and the film ends on an upbeat note ("Because you were wearing your seatbelt!" Jack says to Miles). I've watched the movie 20x and the stuff you list is very liberal interpretation of some scant events.
Miles doesn't kill himself. Well, perhaps at most he does something like that metaphorically -- in that he says goodbye to his old life in the act of drinking that prized bottle alone in the diner.
I wrote this a couple years back on Quora when someone asked "why is Miles celebrating alone in the diner?" Maybe we've all felt something like this at one point.
>> Imagine you’ve been living the last few years with some crazy hope or dream that all the things happening to you are just a fiction and that things are going to turn around. The bottle of wine is a delusional symbol of a life that you’re going to get back — good career, a wife who loves you and wants to have a kid with you. To be opened on the day it all comes true.
Look at Miles’s eyes as his ex-wife tells him she’s expecting a kid with another man. All the hope and fictitious dreaming comes crashing down — that life was a complete delusion, like when you look yourself in a mirror and see, really see, what your life has become and that all the things you’ve been saving that bottle of wine for, just don’t exist.
Not much left to save that bottle for. No one to drink it with and toast over a fancy dinner. Just take it to the grimy local burger joint, drink in sadness to the life events that passed you by, and savor the sublime, once-in-a-lifetime taste of dreams that are dashed on the roadside.
Wine is important because Miles is using his love of wine as a cover for his alcoholism. For the first half of the movie Miles is a basket case while Jack seems to have everything together, but as the plot progresses we see Miles gradually starting to come out of his neuroticism and then the light shines hard on Jack's sex addiction. The movie is about the contrasts and dynamics that evolve from their respective journeys.
I am surprised that a lot of people seem to have watched this movie and identified the two main characters as role models they want to emulate, that wasn’t my takeaway at all. My reading was similar to yours.
That's a problem with a lot of people regarding a lot of movies, I've found: people think the Main Character is always the Good Guy and whatever they do is a positive model for life. See: The Wolf of Wall Street.
They don't evolve at all though. Jack cheats on his wife to be with basically no repercussions and Miles never gets over his ex. It even becomes such an issue with his life he drinks his "crown jewel" wine out of a styrofoam cup because he sees no future.
The comment you're replying to stated the dynamics evolve, and that is true.
In my own reading of the movie, while Jack learns nothing and even earns a reprieve, Miles does evolve -- though painfully and at the very end of the movie. He finally lets go of his ex wife, realizing she's definitely out of reach and committed to a new family now that she's pregnant. He also lets go of his book dream, and also the drinking of his prized bottle signals -- albeit in a humorously depressing manner -- his finally letting go of everything that got him stuck.
In my mind his walking up Maya's stairs is a symbol of a hopeful new beginning. Because this is a dark comedy/drama, it's not immediately obvious everything will work out well, but at least there's hope.
> it’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end.
It is a typically silly fan theory, because if that was the case, there would be no development journey for the character, making the whole story pointless.
Fan theories are often like that: "it's actually all in their head", "its all just a dream". Edgy on the surface, but really negates all the drama and and development of the story.
> the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie
Of course the movie is not "about" wine in the sense of a documentary about wine, but wine is certainly a significant part of the story and the main characters journey.
>Edgy on the surface, but really negates all the drama and and development of the story.
I've noticed that. I suspect it comes from a lack of tragedies in our entertainment, that we try to invent tragic meanings to stories intended as comedies.
To get a little darker - I think it runs deeper than that. Yes, comedy and mindless entertainment are popular, but. . .
I think the "it was all a dream" or "it's all in their head" sort of fan theories come from a place of denial. If the story is real (even in a plainly fictional movie setting), and a character shows development, learning, growth, and change over the course of whatever happens - that could have repercussions in my life. It is easy to get into a rut of behavior and to steadfastly avoid thinking about all of the things you can and should change in your life. If entertainment shows me people who actually do change based on a need to change something about themselves to become better people, then I am forced to think about that and consider what that means for my life. That could mean that I actually do need to be more considerate, healthier, or whatever it is. Whereas, if the entire story is fake, or a dream, or whatever, then how I act now is the inevitable conclusion of my life, and there is no changing.
It's easier to just hand-wave away any lessons about human behavior and say that it's imaginary.
Interesting, maybe there are two factors at play - In coming to my conclusion I was thinking about a common fan theory that Harry Potter would voluntarily die at the end of the series, which would certainly be a departure from how he was introduced as the 'boy who lived'. But your analysis makes a fair bit of sense in the context of plenty of other fan theories I've come across...
"It was all a dream," or, "It's all in their head," are easy fan theories to attach to works of fiction because that's what actually happened. The creator of the fiction imagined it in their brain. You can trivially apply it to any fiction without any creativity.
More complicated fan theories rely on the content itself, and thus are going to change from work to work. So people hear "It's all in their head," more.
In the classical definition, a tragedy is a story about a person of high standing or good fortune who loses everything and typically dies in the end.
In Sideways, Giamattis character starts out in a really bad place, but through the events of the story ends up in a (slightly) more hopeful place. Having him kill himself in the end instead would not turn the story into a genuine tragedy, since nothing would really be lost. That would just be a pointless story going nowhere.
Hayden Church' character on the other hand do have something to lose, so his story could have been made a tragedy.
I forget where I saw the description but I quite enjoy it, an author was breaking down stories into four general groups: In Melodrama, the hero wins. In Tragedy, the dragon wins. In Comedy, the hero and dragon overcome the root of their conflict, and in Farce they dance around each other without resolving anything.
I wasn't familiar with Sideways, but from your description it sounds like I'd call that a comedy being reinterpreted as a farce. Which can be a great story form as well, but maybe it's reached for too often in fan theories because it's the easiest thing to imagine after melodrama.
> I realize that the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie
Agreed!
> It’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end
Uh, the film ends in a hopeful note. Virigina Madsen's character states she enjoyed the book, and he goes to seek her out and is about to knock on her door when the screen fades to black. To me, it is implied she opens the door and at least they become friends again, if not a couple.
Robert Wilson theorizes that each character in Sideways symbolizes a type of wine.
Miles = Pinot noir (thin-skinned, great potential).
Jack = Cabernet Sauvignon (adaptable, survivor).
Maya = 1961 Cheval Blanc (Miles' prized bottle, actress born 1961).
Stephanie = Cabernet Franc (hollow, flabby, overripe, shallow).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0mO0UhBim4&ab_channel=Rober...
The effect may be even bigger than it looks, because the “control” varietal, Cabernet Sauvignon, is often blended with Merlot, so they are presumably somewhat correlated.
Pinot is awful except for higher end bottles. It’s the only grape I can for sure identify a bottle that’s under $30. Merlot, although best in cab blends, can be had at high quality for < $15.
Pinot is just so sensitive and fragile. Merlot is a drinkers wine.
Where are you getting your Pinot Noir from? I routinely buy e.g. Alsatian Pinot Noir for maybe $15 that is very good. With some effort, you might be able to find some hidden gems in Oregon loosely in that price range.
While the US produces excellent wine, Europe usually wins the price/quality battle.
I’ve had it from nearly everywhere from Willamette Valley to Burgundy and I can consistently place the Pinot on first taste. Pinot that happens to around < 30 or 25 just has a bad taste to be. Bitter and burnt tasting.
I’m not some snob who judges wine on price either! I mainly drink cabs that are < 15.
I think Pinot is really hard to grow so we end up with a lot of mediocre stuff. But it has a good enough reputation that the meh stuff still sells at lower price points.
I also prefer bigger reds like cabs. Give me Bordeaux. Easy grape to grow and for the money you get a great wine.
> Repeated studies have shown that “wine experts,” when administered blind tests, are unable to distinguish between cheap and expensive bottles, or different varieties of the same color wine, or even whether the wine they’re drinking is red or white. In the end it’s all just fermented grape juice.
As an American I am angry that they make red wine and white wine, but no blue wine. That damn unpatriotic California wine industry. I will drink Windex instead, and that will show them. It all tastes the same anyway. /g
They do make blue wine, even in California. For example Blaufränkisch can be found in California too. There are many other varieties called “blue”, many of them also I Cali I guess. And in fact, in my language Pinot Noir is actually not “black” but “blue”.
In the best cases "it's sad that ..." means "seeing this makes me feel pity for them", and in the worst is used to belittle someone, as in "your behavior is pathetic"
I certainly can not taste the difference between any of them (and so do most others according to the article), but after Sideways there was definitely something in my subconscious that steered me away from ordering a Merlot.
I don’t think it’s sad at all, it’s a fun reminder about how we function.
There was nothing in the article that lead me to believe people stopped drinking merlot because they didn't want to be seen drinking merlot. If anything the, implication is that Paul Giamatti's character convinced them they wouldn't like it.
Image and identification is a major factor in product enjoyment and loyalty. Even more so when talking about alcoholic beverages.
There is a mystique surrounding wine, as if it is a pure product shaped only by nature and the skill of the winemaker. The reality is that it's an engineered product full of adulterants(many natural and historical, but adulterants nevertheless. Think fining agents, acids, etc). Same with spirits. It's an industry that must produce a consistent product from highly variable inputs. Your impression of the bottle and the label also contribute to the brand/image.
People often choose the beverage that helps them identify with a story or project a certain image, not necessarily something that tastes good. Then again that's part of why their doing it. They want to signal. They need a vehicle for it.
Wine has such a highly publicized social component and reputation for containing depths which are perceptible but inarticulable to non-experts, that I would venture almost no one really knows what they actually like.
I don't know if you've seen the movie, but Giamatti's character does come off as someone you feel really understands when wine is bad, or at least was written by people who do. It's hard to resist that.
Those who have achieved enlightenment just drink what's in front of them, shrug, and say, in the words of Thomas Hayden Church, "tastes okay to me." :)
But that's also a metaphor for the two characters and their approaches to romance and/or sex. Church's Jack will take whatever is in front of him, even if it is someone else's bottle. I'm not sure what the wine version of "omnivorous" is ... perhaps "omnivinous." He simply isn't fussy. No, it's more than that, he is sexually obsessive. "You need to get your joint worked on, Miles" is presented as a solution to Miles' relationship woes. "Don't you just want to feel that cozy little box grip down on your johnson?"
Miles, on the other hand, is speaking of himself when he talks about his interest in Pinot Noir: "It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression."
Miles is fussy. He knows he is temperamental and sensitive. "Ripens early" translates to "I may have already peaked with a previous relationship." He is bitterly aware of how much attention he needs in a relationship, and so on. It's a helpless self-awareness, knowing his flaws but being unable to act on them.
Wine is very much a social status. You gift it. You keep a "good" bottle around for company. Stupid, but how the world works.
My wife and I, we just like and prefer the sweet $8 pink sweet barefoot wine. Despite having no guests, we don't touch the 'good stuff.' For no other reason than we don't like it.
Love that graph how art culture and commerce intermix. It is probably likely that merlot was getting a bit last year's style and this only served to accelerate that. As far as I am concerned they are both lovely grapes and saying that merlot is better than pino noir is like saying that green pants are better than red pants. They are different, sure and some might like one over the other, but "better"?
There’s no “better”. There’s a reason why most French and Italian wines don’t even mention the variety anywhere. Sancere, Bordeaux, Chablis, Beaujolais, Prosecco, Chianti,… Most people don’t know what variety are they, coz it’s not important really.
Except it is important, since each of those regions has very strict laws regarding what is and isn’t allowed in the bottle. Sancerre is 100% Sauvignon Blanc, red Bordeaux some blend of six permitted grapes, Cab and Merlot being the primary ones (subregions have laws regarding which subset is allowed), Chablis is 100% Chardonnay, Beaujolais is 100% Gamay, Chianti is at least 70% Sangiovese. Wines from these regions aren’t labeled varietally because they don’t need to be. New World wines don’t have that luxury.
That is not the point. The point is that the grape variety is just one piece of the puzzle. Ordering wine by variety is therefore basically nonsense.
It’s very common that waiter tells you we have Pinot Noir or Merlot, but without telling you at least from where they are, that information is pretty much worthless. And I’m almost sure most people can’t tell the difference anyway.
I’m a lifelong wine lover, even with some education in wine tasting, and the more I know about wine, the less I’m sure I’d be able to tell them apart in blind tasting. It’s more like I roughly know what style of wine I can expect from different countries, and which varieties have good conditions in those countries and which are better avoided.
I’m a Certified Sommelier and I’m going to have to say agree to disagree. Yes, region is important. But varietal is by far the critical piece when predicting what a wine is going to taste like.
Do some Merlots taste more like Cabs? Sure. Is an experienced wine drinker going to mistake Pinot Noir for Sauvignon Blanc, even if they’re both from Sancerre? No way.
Ok fair points. I think our idea of “experienced wine drinker” might be quite far apart. My guess is that maybe 5% of regular wine drinkers can identify variety from a random sample. I’m definitely not one of them and comfortable admitting that.
There's a difference though between identifying variety from a random sample and knowing what you like. While non-experts often have trouble describing their preferences, they don't have trouble identifying them. A wine drinker with a few years of experience may not be able to tell you why they like Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz, and dislike Pinot Noir. But if you pour them a St. Laurent you shouldn't be surprised when they don't like it.
The names do usually require a specific blend of grape varieties, among other things. IMO it's easier to shop this way because a specific blend from a specific region made in a specific way will have a much more consistent flavor profile than just "California Pinot Noir"—even if you get more geographically specific, the European style of labeling is a better indication of what you're gonna taste, so once you learn a few that you like, you know exactly what to look for in the store.
> There’s no “better”.
To nitpick, there are definitely better and worse winemaking grapes—thing is, the bad ones are only grown by necessity, as in the case that the better ones won't grow well due to e.g. weather, so for obvious reasons they only tend to feature in wine from places that aren't known for winemaking.
It looks a bit like Pinot Noir was already on a pretty clear upswing, could this not just be a correlation with trends in wine in general - dryer, less sweet/bodied reds?
It would be interesting to see a comparison to whites - are Chardonnays and Pinot Gris also on an upward trend?
Pretty much any red wine you’d be drinking is 100% dry—there’s no residual sugar left in the bottle after fermentation. If by “sweet” you mean “fruity” the Cab v. Pinot comparison kind of rules that out, since American Merlot sits about halfway between Pinot and Cab in terms of being fruit-forward, as well as with any other descriptors that might classify as “body”, such as alcohol and tannin.
That's not true. A lot of low-end (by which I mean "inexpensive", not "low quality") and some mid-range cabs and Zinfandels are made with a little bit of residual sugar. JAM and Barefoot cabernet are two examples.
I used to run a wine tasting group. We once did a blind tasting of cabs which included a silver oak on the high end. All twelve of us picked barefoot as our first or second choice and all twelve ranked the silver oak dead last. Granted this was a long time ago but I still like a glass of bf now and then.
Rombauer also makes their reds with a little bit of sugar and I think they are excellent.
I’ll agree with you that Silver Oak rates dead last. But “cheap” wines with residual sugar often outperform other wines in taste tests because the sugar throws the test. It’s hard to compete against the brain’s response to glucose!
There is still going to be residual sugar. You are going to start killing your yeast from the alcohol concentration in the wine before you run out of sugar. Some red wine is extremely sweet almost like juice.
There are yeasts that can survive in ~20% alcohol solutions. Most red wines are in the 10-15% range, while there might be some residual sugar, the wine is considered “dry” and there won’t be much or any perceived sweetness.
Sweet reds do exist, but almost all of them are fortified to stop fermentation early and leave sugar in the bottle, or just cheap wines with sugar added to appeal to simpler palates.
There's plenty of reds with sugar in them. Your typical Italian will have something around 4–7 g per liter in it. First four Italian reds I checked on Alko's (Finnish booze monopoly) website, priced 14–37 €: 2, 12, 11, 3 g/l.
It's more plausible to me that the movie was a product of its times rather than the cause of the trend. Maybe there was more interest in wine during that time, and more discussion about the different types. It would explain why a movie centered around wine was developed and became a box office success.
Maddox, author of The Best Page in the Universe, wrote about exactly this phenomenon shortly after the movie came out. [1] Warning: It's Maddox, so it's crass.
>In the movie, Giamatti's character is a wine aficionado who drinks Pinot Noir in favor of Merlot, a wine that he despises. Now every idiot who has seen the movie has suddenly become a wine expert, and Pinot sales have shot through the roof. NPR interviewed a guy who said, and I quote:
"I used to drink merlot, and after I saw the movie, they say 'don't drink merlot,' so [now] I'm drinking pinot noir... "
It's somewhat quaint that in 2021 Maddox can still be described as "crass." He sure was at the time of publishing, but the internet has taken a decided turn towards the impolite since then.
If your vineyard has cases of unsold merlot at the end of a couple of seasons, you can change pretty quickly.
The graph shows plantings are flat for a couple of years before the vineyards actually started switching, they just weren't planting new merlot grapes.
A lot of Americans really only knew about "red" and "white" wines back then (and frankly still do). Red was very often a cheap merlot, while white was a cheap chardonnay. I recall so many (so many!) terrible merlots and chardonnays from that era, that I was entirely put off of both for about a decade. Only recently have I started asking for either of them again, and I've found the quality has definitely improved. On the flip side, a lot of pinots have gotten lousy in the interim.
But drink what you like. Giamatti's character was so troubled in that film, and his advice was definitely questionable.
I recently watched Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) for the first time, and there's a laughable exchange where Eddie Murphy says, "I brought red wine", and Angela Bassett says something like, "My favorite!"
American wine palette has come a long way since then
One of the better Columbo episodes, "Any Old Port In A Storm", features Donald Pleasence as a California winery owner with some telling descriptions of American wine culture in the 70s.
Sure they do, but does the average consumer understand the difference between the regions and grapes? Probably not. I bet there are even many experienced drinkers who could not identify them in a blind test.
It’s complicated. A lot of the research is misreported. The supposed study demonstrating that experts can’t tell the difference between red and white wine says no such thing. But people do love a narrative that takes the wind out of a snob’s sails, so the legend persists.
True experts can distinguish an astonishing number of characteristics of wine in a blind taste. Most people are not experts. The price of wine is also largely decoupled from how much any given person will enjoy it. (However, psychologically, you will probably enjoy a bottle you paid $100 for more than one you paid $20 for.)
Basically: Wine is not all just indistinguishable fermented grape juice, but most stuff written about wine is a combination of bunk and rarified trivia no normal drinker should care about. Drink what makes you happy.
Sidenote on wine pricing, heard on the radio: in Europe, the cost of everything but the contents of a bottle of wine is about €2.50 (or a bit higher). That covers the glass, the label, transport, branding of the chateau, etc.
Corollary: the wine in a €4 euro bottle is 3x as expensive as the wine in a €3 bottle €1.50 vs €0.50).
That broadcast was a while ago, so the details might not be exact. But the main point is that after the first (about) 3 euro, you're starting to spend money on the contents. Before, you're literally paying a few pennies for the wine...
That's probably true outside of wine-producing regions. In wine-producing regions of Europe, you can get a cheap bottle of wine for €1. It's often decent* quality too.
* well, better than the £5 bottles you get here in the UK
"A lot of Americans really only knew about "red" and "white" wines back then"
At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions. Indeed, a major reason the merlot spiel had such an impact with so many is precisely because it was so popular. Many like to be a contrarian, so if something knocks on the popular thing that can have an impact ("who else can't stand Tiktok, right?"). Most of the varieties of merlot were very high quality, and I doubt the overwhelming bulk of wine drinkers could taste any deficiency (many can't even differentiate varieties).
That's a much better article about the rise and fall of California merlot, and basically notes that merlot had plateaued by Sideways release, and there's a bit of a cause/correlation mixup happening.
> At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions.
I think it's probably more accurate to say that everyone felt they were supposed to be familiar with the major wine varieties so all had picked up the terms and desperately clung to a few half-earned opinions because they didn't want to appear unsophisticated. But I think most people didn't actually have particularly strongly held or individually acquired wine preferences. (It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.)
This is a social situation that's ripe for a radical opinion swing. Because everyone is trying to look like they know what everyone else knows but there's little "ground truth" (i.e. actual personal opinions) slowing down the change. So when a movie like Sideways comes out with a character who clearly cares deeply about wine and knows a lot and expresses a strong opinion. Well, I guess merlot's not cool anymore.
I agree with you to a point. Infrequent wine drinkers who want a casual option generally prefer a lighter, sweeter or more fruity wine. These people truly didn't like cabernet (too bitter for many), but they wanted to be "with it" and merlot was the hotness, so it became a go to. As the article I linked above mentioned, for these people pinot noir was always a better choice, but the hotness of merlot (at the time pinot was oft considered a dessert wine) made it socially less of a norm. Sideways, and people just generally discovering that there were other options, made it an easier social choice for many, and pinot noir was on fire.
As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.
> that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.
It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately.
Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.
People should embrace being unsophisticated. I've gotten really good results by saying something like "Woah, I've never had orange wine before, I'm looking for something kinda dry."
> It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.
This is demonstrably false, btw. Either those professionals you are referring to are completely untrained (just being in the wine business doesn’t mean you are an experienced taster) or it’s just complete bullshit.
>At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions.
Millions of drinking age drinkers in America then and today know nothing about wine. Perhaps I just missed the intentional exaggeration, but "living in bubbles" was a discussion I had with a friend recently and this struck me as that kind of line.
It's an exaggeration. But among people who actually drink wine -- the subject of this discussion -- I suspect the overwhelming majority understand the varieties, and maybe even have a presumptive preference. People who don't drink wine aren't really pertinent.
I'm a counter-example. I drink wine. I have no idea what anything is. I've never seen Sideways, and don't know what it's about. I can tell the difference between red and white. I don't really get any of the rest of it. I still like to drink wine. Just a glass now and then. Sometimes I pick out a bottle at the store based on the look of the label.
I think it is nice to know some of the different ways to analyze reds and whites. Dry vs. sweet, tannic or not. Reds, how fruity they are and what kind of fruit (cherry, dark/stone fruit or bright and berry). Earthy/funky or smooth and light.
To me, those are things that allow you to elevate your enjoyment of tasting the wine itself. Anything beyond that (knowing region or grape by taste) is turning wine into a hobby, which is fine, but not necessary.
Naah. Maybe - maybe - people who buy wine regularly might know.
But you'll come far enough with general guidelines (older = better, except some years are very good and others... less so) to please guests. Except for the amateur vinologist, but he gets to be happy about showcasing his knowledge.
Well, merlot is a blending grape and that’s been wine industry “wisdom” for a long time, the book and movie just taught randos what the experts already believed. People outside of the US largely don’t drink it straight. Americans just glommed onto it because it sounded French. Pinot is quite drinkable as the main/sole grape.
Of course, drink what you like. But the industry was hardly “broken” (If anything Id bet it was accelerated) just altered.
I got thrown out of a hoighty-toighty Napa winery once for jokingly asking for a bottle of "Night Train" (note, I only knew it from watching "The Blues Brothers").
I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect, Merlot isn't necessarily a hugely popular wine here but I sometimes prefer it over a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz since a lot of wine makers here have followed a bit of a trend for "full bodied" (aka sledgehammer) wines from those varieties. It's a bit like the megalitres of India Pale Ale that is virtually undrinkable because the brewers are in a competition to see how much they can destroy the overall flavour with hops.
...so try the Merlot (esp. Australian merlot). It's tasty, affordable and won't leave you feeling like you lost a fight the next day.
I hear you on the beer front, there is so much bad beer especially IPA. I'm starting to stick to the stuff that has consistent quality. I've just had too much horse shit thinking I'm trying something "different".
A good IPA is a great beer, but it is hard to get right, so a lot of less talented brewers defer to overloading the hops and trying to make a virtue of it.
The most talented brewers I see, have really talented QA folks standing right behind them helping them make targets for their process and blend things that are out of spec ect.
The smaller breweries will always make something different but their consistency is atrocious most of the time.
Before quitting alcohol, I also came round on IPAs to the point that it was the only beer I'd drink. But there's also a tendency for many breweries to out-hop each other. That's when it becomes over the top.
I've had much better luck drinking IPA's than red wine. Most red wine is too acidic for my taste. And particularly in the PNW, IPA is still where it's at. If you go look at grocery store, they're stocking IPAs more than other kinds of beer here.
That said I've appreciated drinking red wine more after drinking an IPA, as it seems to help me get past the tannins quicker.
A lot of brewers will admit that if your beer doesnt turnout the way you want you a trick is tossing in a ton of hops and making it an IPA. Once you get used to doing that you become a brewery that only makes IPA.
It does seem to have swung back a bit over the last few years though. I find people are looking for, "drinkability" over "hoppyness" but that's obviously anticdata.
>A lot of brewers will admit that if your beer doesn't turnout the way you want you a trick is tossing in a ton of hops and making it an IPA. Once you get used to doing that you become a brewery that only makes IPA.
Larger craft breweries really don't have this luxury. They need to have both a means of production laser focused quality and process oriented folks AND a place for rapid research and development.
What is ironic is when a craft brewery starts reaching size where they can afford these types of benefits they are often demonized for various reasons all having to do with the Brand.
If you like shiraz but aren't big on the full bodied style try some from Pokolbin. I don't know if it just didn't follow the trend or if environmental factors come in to play but it's generally lighter.
I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect
I think the other side of this is that Merlot was very popular. Everyone had already tried the Merlot. Merlot was overrepresented, so, there was like a Merlot "bubble" at the time, in part because of reports on the French Paradox [0], and it being the most popular grape in France and a very popular grape in California and the Finger Lakes. More than the film putting down Merlot, it was praising Pinot Noir. So, you have a movie more or less telling wine drinkers there's another wine you can drink besides Merlot...
After Russ Hanneman yelled "These are not the doors of a billionaire" and raged off in his 4-door Maserati on Silicon Valley while playing Crazy Town music, Maserati Quattroporte sedan sales plunged as well.
There's no evidence of this. Maserati sales are low enough that there is no causative effect for something like mentioned above. Have any stats to back that up?
My theory: Alcoholic drinks have the basic problem that they are generally unpalatable to most people, especially the first time you try them. The alcohol industry has a high advertising to sales ratio [1], presumably because they always need to remind people that it is cool and fun to drink hand sanitiser. Thus one movie can easily shift consumer behaviour, because nobody really ‘likes’ merlot or any grape the same way they may like fried chicken or coke (which seem impervious to bad press).
(I am not advocating for prohibition or anything like that by the way. Clearly many people enjoy wine, beer and spirits in moderation, although often this follows ingrained sociocultural norms.)
I will have to hard disagree with your theory that we must all need to be constantly reminded it's fun to drink "hand sanitizer", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Alcohol seems quite popular and has been quite popular for literally millenia, no massive advertising campaigns needed. The alcohol industry is highly competitive, and saturating consumers with ads can certainly influence their choice of which alcohol to buy.
And lest you accuse me of being a lightweight, I regularly enjoy in moderation something actually not that far off from hand sanitizer - cask strength whisky, weighing in at 60+% ABV. Because it is undiluted out of the barrel, it provides an incredibly intense flavor and aroma that I do not need to be tricked into liking.
I think it is a bit more complicated than you make out. The popularity for millenia is really when the only competing beverage was water, and even clean water was hard to get until recently. In recent times, soft drinks and juices have usurped the ubiquity of wine at the dinner table in France for example (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21929287).
Out of interest, what did you think about the whisky the very first time you tried it? Do you think it is likely that without all the notions out there about whisky to do with cachet, heritage, masculinity etc that you would have kept drinking it? That is my point. This is all quite aside from your current experience of drinking whisky, which is of course entirely legitimate and enjoyable of itself. I like beer now but the first time I had it I couldn't get one mouthful down.
> I think it is a bit more complicated than you make out. The popularity for millenia is really when the only competing beverage was water, and even clean water was hard to get until recently.
Oh, come on. People like to get drunk. It's that simple. That "the only competing beverage was water" is some kind of argument ... get real. That's completely ridiculous. People REALLY REALLY like to get drunk. Water is no competition. Has nothing to do with what the drink tastes like.
When you've been off them for a while, coke and fried chicken can be disgusting. Coke is sickly sweet with an unpleasant gaseous mouthfeel, and fried chicken is a greasy dry coating over pure protein. Coca-Cola in particular has a huge marketing budget.
Firstly, this is a very American view. In wine cultures (France, Italy, Spain, Argentina), children grow up tasting wine from an early age. In beer cultures (Germany, Czechia, Belgium, Holland, England) it's the same for beer. I grew up in the US but my parents let us try everything, have a glass of wine with dinner, with the idea that alcohol shouldn't be some forbidden / exotic thing that you suddenly encounter as a college freshman and binge out on. But I remember being 17 or 18 and my friends having to hold their nose and chug booze really fast because they hated the taste. I found that shocking. FWIW, all those friends love alcohol now - a bit too much, maybe.
A lot of it goes to the fact that bitter, acidic, pungent things are an "acquired taste" in American culture. That's just not true in countries where children grow up with stronger flavors like real unpasteurized cheeses, fermented foods, and offal.
So what you say might be true as far as ad spending influencing the basic, cheese-puff-snorting American, but the premise that alcohol is unpalatable to most people (at least, most people around the world) is a false projection.
My semi-nightly movie time usually involves a bottle of wine (I change up what kind), couple squares of 90% to 100% chocolate, bowl of homemade popcorn, some American Spirit dark rolling tobacco, and a CBD+THC gummy. All those alkaloids roll around your senses like bittersweet heaven.
I always love how on the show Flaked[0], Will Arnett's character lifts Giametti's speech on Pinots and why he loves[1] them down to the word, and there is zero nod to it in the show.
If you didn't know the speech was from Sideways you'd think Arnett's character is deeply eloquent, and if you did happen to see Sideways recently, you see him for the fraud he is.
I like how the article says the film is about one guy touring wine country. I feel like the author just loathes Thomas Hayden Church and will, at any opportunity, erase him from history.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread[Edit: others were kind enough to remind me that the saved wine is actually Cheval Blanc, a 55-40-5 Cab Franc, Merlot, and Cab Sauv blend. It’s been awhile since I’ve thought out talked about this movie.]
My parents prefer cabernet sauvignon, by the by.
Merlot can be the basis for excellent wine (see: Petrus). However, I think California generally produces mediocre merlot. California's strengths are Cabernet (Sauvignon and Franc) and Zinfandel. For Pinot Noir, there are a couple spots like the Russian River Valley that do a good job, but Oregon has a stronger claim.
In the US, you kind of need to know what varietals grow well in what regions. In Europe, they typically produce varietal blends that are optimized for the region where they are produced, but which have very different characteristics depending on the region. I prefer the European model of branding on the region rather than the varietal, because the wine experience is more consistent and predictable. You know it will usually be an appropriate varietal for the region in which it is produced. That is not always the case in the US; we seem to grow any varietal anywhere if we think we can sell it.
That said, if you want to look smart about wine without spending a ton of money, the best choice is something from a region relatively few people have heard of, and therefore inexpensive, that nonetheless produces brilliant wine. Sommeliers often appreciate people that can identify those hidden gems on the list because people trying to be flashy don't even recognize them. Of course, you learn this by drinking wine from literally everywhere, and especially places you've never heard of, until you form an opinion. Availability varies widely with geography but in 2021, with the globalization of wine, there is little reason to spend much more than $10-20 bottle (retail, not restaurant) for almost any style if you know your regions and quality is the sole objective (local availability notwithstanding).
But then, I'm just a random wine drinker on the Internet. :-)
Beyond that, I am not sure if one can trust a simple list. I think this is because region can be very narrowly defined - sometimes "side of this hill, vs. that side". Then, each year also produces different quality.
I think there are certain prototypes per region that you could learn about. But even that is a challenge. So for France, for example, the regions you want to learn don't stack hierarchically in a nice fashion (like you start with 4 broad regions and break them down). But it can be done. In realiy, however, different wines are made in each region (see "region" above) so you are not guaranteed to get something like the prototype, nor can you guarantee that the wines of a given year will be like the prototype at all. Another good example is Italy, which has fewer prototypical examples one might be able to learn. But then, Italy also has a great number of wine makers that do something very different, sometimes something better, so again it doesn't help you find a good wine.
Best bet is to pick a region and really get into it. Like, learning stuff about Bordeaux can keep you busy, but at least you'll have a solid idea. The wrong approach would be to do stuff like say: "oh Bordeaux has Merlot, while Germany has Pinot" which is sort of true in ratios of averages, but individually, and also generally, incredibly wrong.
I personally believe that identifying a good wine in all cases basically requires you to know about the wine maker and the year. I.e. - it's a full time job.
Agreed on Cabernet Sauvignon. Regarding Pinot Noir, there's just nothing in the US that compares to a good Burgundy, some things I think are interesting are Domaine De La Cote in California and Kelley Fox in Oregon though :)
Cheers!
https://www.paxwine.com/
- Napa & Sonoma counties collectively have 650+ wineries.
- Paso Robles and the extended SLO county (plus Santa Barbara) region have 500+ wineries.
Saying that just the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc are standouts, the latter of which is rarely at 80+% because it is harder to tame in a bottle, by approximately 1150 wineries that produce all manner of Bourdeaux and Rhone varietals is quite reductive.
Oregon Pinots are good if that’s what you like: earthly, terroir-driven taste. California wines are fruitier, part of this is the fruit and the other is the limited use of whole cluster fermentation.
Washington is emerging as a fantastic wine producing state as well.
So, on balance, there is something for every palate produced by California wineries. Maybe even Washington producers. Oregon wineries are getting into Syrah and the darker reds as well.
I agree with your $10-20 range for a decent bottle of wine (retail). What I’d add to your statement is that you shouldn’t need to buy a bottle not produced in the USA if you live here. The locally made wine compares to international options, especially in the targeted price range ($10-20).
What about the Pinots from "Sideways" in Santa Ynez area? Paul Lato, Sea Smoke (maybe played out) to name a couple.
Funny enough I'd been to Lompoc a half a dozen times before I realized it was the region from the movie.
How is this possible in the Internet age? I mean, I've always liked Dolcetto d'Alba (I know, Piemonte is a well known region, but not for this wine), but in the 10s, there were a few popular articles talking about how it's such a great pizza & pasta wine, and all of a sudden, bottles were more expensive...
Neither of us had heard anything about Serbian wines or that they had any wine production nor that it's really good.
So I'd say there are ton of interesting regions to be discovered.
That said its often hard to find those. I like red wines from the regions near Capetown, SA. You can get some of it in big wine stores, but its hard.
I have experienced wines I discovered when they were inexpensive become trendy and therefore expensive. I've always just moved on; you'll never run out of obscure wine-producing regions that produce excellent inexpensive wine. The largest practical limit is distribution, but wine has become much more global.
You will find a lot of good wine in countries you might not expect e.g. white wine in Mexico. Many countries that produce superior wine almost never export, such as Switzerland. There are excellent small appellations even in France with brilliant wine that everyone ignores because few people have ever heard of them, so it costs very little if you can find it. Smaller countries in Europe are always at a disadvantage regardless of their wine quality e.g. Portuguese and Spanish wine are very similar in quality and style but Spanish wine commands the higher price.
There isn't nearly as much information about wine on the Internet as you may hope. Absent a substantial marketing effort, it largely isn't discoverable virtually. Even in cases where countries like Uruguay attempt to market their wines, it has minimal visibility to the wine drinking world.
It is an inefficient market with incentives that don't necessarily ensure the best wines for the money are easy to find.
By now the place has probably changed name or owners. It was a pretty good local flavor burger joint at the time.
I've always been left wondering if the "I am not drinking any fucking Merlot" line was a direct result of the snub by Petrus.
source: https://www.chateau-cheval-blanc.com/en/vintages/chateau-che... (you can check other vintages there etc)
Now that I’m the age of the characters in the movie I realize that the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie (and also that it’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end.) It’s funny that such a small subplot in a feature film can have a dramatic effect on a major industry like wine making.
There's even a sequel to the novel with the same characters.
I'm calling "shenanigans" on this whole "Miles kills himself" meme.
Yeah, there are references to death and suicide in the movie, like there is in most fiction about depression. But there's nothing explicit about Miles's fate, and the film ends on an upbeat note ("Because you were wearing your seatbelt!" Jack says to Miles). I've watched the movie 20x and the stuff you list is very liberal interpretation of some scant events.
I wrote this a couple years back on Quora when someone asked "why is Miles celebrating alone in the diner?" Maybe we've all felt something like this at one point.
>> Imagine you’ve been living the last few years with some crazy hope or dream that all the things happening to you are just a fiction and that things are going to turn around. The bottle of wine is a delusional symbol of a life that you’re going to get back — good career, a wife who loves you and wants to have a kid with you. To be opened on the day it all comes true.
Look at Miles’s eyes as his ex-wife tells him she’s expecting a kid with another man. All the hope and fictitious dreaming comes crashing down — that life was a complete delusion, like when you look yourself in a mirror and see, really see, what your life has become and that all the things you’ve been saving that bottle of wine for, just don’t exist.
Not much left to save that bottle for. No one to drink it with and toast over a fancy dinner. Just take it to the grimy local burger joint, drink in sadness to the life events that passed you by, and savor the sublime, once-in-a-lifetime taste of dreams that are dashed on the roadside.
In my own reading of the movie, while Jack learns nothing and even earns a reprieve, Miles does evolve -- though painfully and at the very end of the movie. He finally lets go of his ex wife, realizing she's definitely out of reach and committed to a new family now that she's pregnant. He also lets go of his book dream, and also the drinking of his prized bottle signals -- albeit in a humorously depressing manner -- his finally letting go of everything that got him stuck.
In my mind his walking up Maya's stairs is a symbol of a hopeful new beginning. Because this is a dark comedy/drama, it's not immediately obvious everything will work out well, but at least there's hope.
I had to check for myself and it really doesn't look that way to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86sA9H1M76k
No it isn't.
It is a typically silly fan theory, because if that was the case, there would be no development journey for the character, making the whole story pointless.
Fan theories are often like that: "it's actually all in their head", "its all just a dream". Edgy on the surface, but really negates all the drama and and development of the story.
> the wine is literally the least important factor in the movie
Of course the movie is not "about" wine in the sense of a documentary about wine, but wine is certainly a significant part of the story and the main characters journey.
I've noticed that. I suspect it comes from a lack of tragedies in our entertainment, that we try to invent tragic meanings to stories intended as comedies.
I think the "it was all a dream" or "it's all in their head" sort of fan theories come from a place of denial. If the story is real (even in a plainly fictional movie setting), and a character shows development, learning, growth, and change over the course of whatever happens - that could have repercussions in my life. It is easy to get into a rut of behavior and to steadfastly avoid thinking about all of the things you can and should change in your life. If entertainment shows me people who actually do change based on a need to change something about themselves to become better people, then I am forced to think about that and consider what that means for my life. That could mean that I actually do need to be more considerate, healthier, or whatever it is. Whereas, if the entire story is fake, or a dream, or whatever, then how I act now is the inevitable conclusion of my life, and there is no changing.
It's easier to just hand-wave away any lessons about human behavior and say that it's imaginary.
"It was all a dream," or, "It's all in their head," are easy fan theories to attach to works of fiction because that's what actually happened. The creator of the fiction imagined it in their brain. You can trivially apply it to any fiction without any creativity.
More complicated fan theories rely on the content itself, and thus are going to change from work to work. So people hear "It's all in their head," more.
In Sideways, Giamattis character starts out in a really bad place, but through the events of the story ends up in a (slightly) more hopeful place. Having him kill himself in the end instead would not turn the story into a genuine tragedy, since nothing would really be lost. That would just be a pointless story going nowhere.
Hayden Church' character on the other hand do have something to lose, so his story could have been made a tragedy.
I wasn't familiar with Sideways, but from your description it sounds like I'd call that a comedy being reinterpreted as a farce. Which can be a great story form as well, but maybe it's reached for too often in fan theories because it's the easiest thing to imagine after melodrama.
Agreed!
> It’s implied Paul Giamatti’s character kills himself at the end
Uh, the film ends in a hopeful note. Virigina Madsen's character states she enjoyed the book, and he goes to seek her out and is about to knock on her door when the screen fades to black. To me, it is implied she opens the door and at least they become friends again, if not a couple.
https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.72/p2z.144.myftpuploa...
https://www.scriptreaderpro.com/best-screenplays-to-read/
I also think Pinot is superior (both the white or the red variety). Chardonay and Merlo are every day staple, but Pino is just a tad better.
I think once more people tried Pinot (Noir or Grigio), they just stuck with it because it is good.
Pinot is just so sensitive and fragile. Merlot is a drinkers wine.
While the US produces excellent wine, Europe usually wins the price/quality battle.
I’m not some snob who judges wine on price either! I mainly drink cabs that are < 15.
I think Pinot is really hard to grow so we end up with a lot of mediocre stuff. But it has a good enough reputation that the meh stuff still sells at lower price points.
I also prefer bigger reds like cabs. Give me Bordeaux. Easy grape to grow and for the money you get a great wine.
As an American I am angry that they make red wine and white wine, but no blue wine. That damn unpatriotic California wine industry. I will drink Windex instead, and that will show them. It all tastes the same anyway. /g
There're already blue potatoes, so cmon wine industry, please make it happen!
https://www.md2020wine.com/bottles/
Disclaimer: enjoy responsibly and may god have mercy on your soul.
[1] http://www.bumwine.com/
Or are you saying, “I don’t like it when people care about how they’ll be seen so much that they can’t do whatever they like.”?
I don’t think it’s sad at all, it’s a fun reminder about how we function.
There is a mystique surrounding wine, as if it is a pure product shaped only by nature and the skill of the winemaker. The reality is that it's an engineered product full of adulterants(many natural and historical, but adulterants nevertheless. Think fining agents, acids, etc). Same with spirits. It's an industry that must produce a consistent product from highly variable inputs. Your impression of the bottle and the label also contribute to the brand/image.
People often choose the beverage that helps them identify with a story or project a certain image, not necessarily something that tastes good. Then again that's part of why their doing it. They want to signal. They need a vehicle for it.
I don't know if you've seen the movie, but Giamatti's character does come off as someone you feel really understands when wine is bad, or at least was written by people who do. It's hard to resist that.
Those who have achieved enlightenment just drink what's in front of them, shrug, and say, in the words of Thomas Hayden Church, "tastes okay to me." :)
Miles, on the other hand, is speaking of himself when he talks about his interest in Pinot Noir: "It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression."
Miles is fussy. He knows he is temperamental and sensitive. "Ripens early" translates to "I may have already peaked with a previous relationship." He is bitterly aware of how much attention he needs in a relationship, and so on. It's a helpless self-awareness, knowing his flaws but being unable to act on them.
My wife and I, we just like and prefer the sweet $8 pink sweet barefoot wine. Despite having no guests, we don't touch the 'good stuff.' For no other reason than we don't like it.
It’s very common that waiter tells you we have Pinot Noir or Merlot, but without telling you at least from where they are, that information is pretty much worthless. And I’m almost sure most people can’t tell the difference anyway.
I’m a lifelong wine lover, even with some education in wine tasting, and the more I know about wine, the less I’m sure I’d be able to tell them apart in blind tasting. It’s more like I roughly know what style of wine I can expect from different countries, and which varieties have good conditions in those countries and which are better avoided.
Do some Merlots taste more like Cabs? Sure. Is an experienced wine drinker going to mistake Pinot Noir for Sauvignon Blanc, even if they’re both from Sancerre? No way.
> There’s no “better”.
To nitpick, there are definitely better and worse winemaking grapes—thing is, the bad ones are only grown by necessity, as in the case that the better ones won't grow well due to e.g. weather, so for obvious reasons they only tend to feature in wine from places that aren't known for winemaking.
It would be interesting to see a comparison to whites - are Chardonnays and Pinot Gris also on an upward trend?
OK, let's generalize my comment to "common attributes" of wines like Pinot Noir.
Rombauer also makes their reds with a little bit of sugar and I think they are excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK_hx5A54EU&t=5m18s
Not enough sugar ;-)
Sweet reds do exist, but almost all of them are fortified to stop fermentation early and leave sugar in the bottle, or just cheap wines with sugar added to appeal to simpler palates.
Presumably the rant against Merlot is in the book, so perhaps it is less likely to just be a product of the times.
>In the movie, Giamatti's character is a wine aficionado who drinks Pinot Noir in favor of Merlot, a wine that he despises. Now every idiot who has seen the movie has suddenly become a wine expert, and Pinot sales have shot through the roof. NPR interviewed a guy who said, and I quote: "I used to drink merlot, and after I saw the movie, they say 'don't drink merlot,' so [now] I'm drinking pinot noir... "
[1] http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sideways
The graph shows plantings are flat for a couple of years before the vineyards actually started switching, they just weren't planting new merlot grapes.
But drink what you like. Giamatti's character was so troubled in that film, and his advice was definitely questionable.
American wine palette has come a long way since then
Oh, come on.
Even budget grocery stores separate their wines by region and grape.
Just about every American who drinks wine has their favorites, even if it just goes as far as something like "I like Malbec because it's less dry."
True experts can distinguish an astonishing number of characteristics of wine in a blind taste. Most people are not experts. The price of wine is also largely decoupled from how much any given person will enjoy it. (However, psychologically, you will probably enjoy a bottle you paid $100 for more than one you paid $20 for.)
Basically: Wine is not all just indistinguishable fermented grape juice, but most stuff written about wine is a combination of bunk and rarified trivia no normal drinker should care about. Drink what makes you happy.
Corollary: the wine in a €4 euro bottle is 3x as expensive as the wine in a €3 bottle €1.50 vs €0.50).
That broadcast was a while ago, so the details might not be exact. But the main point is that after the first (about) 3 euro, you're starting to spend money on the contents. Before, you're literally paying a few pennies for the wine...
* well, better than the £5 bottles you get here in the UK
At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions. Indeed, a major reason the merlot spiel had such an impact with so many is precisely because it was so popular. Many like to be a contrarian, so if something knocks on the popular thing that can have an impact ("who else can't stand Tiktok, right?"). Most of the varieties of merlot were very high quality, and I doubt the overwhelming bulk of wine drinkers could taste any deficiency (many can't even differentiate varieties).
https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b...
That's a much better article about the rise and fall of California merlot, and basically notes that merlot had plateaued by Sideways release, and there's a bit of a cause/correlation mixup happening.
I think it's probably more accurate to say that everyone felt they were supposed to be familiar with the major wine varieties so all had picked up the terms and desperately clung to a few half-earned opinions because they didn't want to appear unsophisticated. But I think most people didn't actually have particularly strongly held or individually acquired wine preferences. (It's well known that even professionals can often not correctly identify what variety or even what color wine they're drinking.)
This is a social situation that's ripe for a radical opinion swing. Because everyone is trying to look like they know what everyone else knows but there's little "ground truth" (i.e. actual personal opinions) slowing down the change. So when a movie like Sideways comes out with a character who clearly cares deeply about wine and knows a lot and expresses a strong opinion. Well, I guess merlot's not cool anymore.
As an aside, while I absolutely agree that most wine snobbiness is absolute horseshit (there is loads of it throughout the discussion in various other threads), that study on wine "experts" who couldn't tell the difference between red and wine is just terrible nonsense. It was some students who were recruited and smelled wines, given the visual cues of color.
It's even less than that. The study showed that if people are primed to think they're drinking red wine, their responses reflect that. If the experiments wanted a controlled study on whether the subjects could tell red and white wine apart, they could have blindfolded them or told them the wines had all been dyed the same colour, and the students would have discriminated between them very accurately.
Anyway, like you I tend to discount the opinion of anyone who misinterprets this study's results in the way that the article does.
This is demonstrably false, btw. Either those professionals you are referring to are completely untrained (just being in the wine business doesn’t mean you are an experienced taster) or it’s just complete bullshit.
Millions of drinking age drinkers in America then and today know nothing about wine. Perhaps I just missed the intentional exaggeration, but "living in bubbles" was a discussion I had with a friend recently and this struck me as that kind of line.
To me, those are things that allow you to elevate your enjoyment of tasting the wine itself. Anything beyond that (knowing region or grape by taste) is turning wine into a hobby, which is fine, but not necessary.
But you'll come far enough with general guidelines (older = better, except some years are very good and others... less so) to please guests. Except for the amateur vinologist, but he gets to be happy about showcasing his knowledge.
Of course, drink what you like. But the industry was hardly “broken” (If anything Id bet it was accelerated) just altered.
I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect, Merlot isn't necessarily a hugely popular wine here but I sometimes prefer it over a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz since a lot of wine makers here have followed a bit of a trend for "full bodied" (aka sledgehammer) wines from those varieties. It's a bit like the megalitres of India Pale Ale that is virtually undrinkable because the brewers are in a competition to see how much they can destroy the overall flavour with hops.
...so try the Merlot (esp. Australian merlot). It's tasty, affordable and won't leave you feeling like you lost a fight the next day.
She looks at the menu and asks, "Oh, do they have any IPAs? That's what everyone's drinking in {insert hometown}."
"Mom... IPAs are kind of overdone now. There's lots of other, more interesting types of beer."
Waiter arrives. My mother, "Do you have any IPAs you would recommend?"
Waiter replies, "We have some good ones, but if you want my opinion, IPAs are kind of overdone. We have lots of more interesting beers."
I went to a lot of trouble to acquire a taste for those evil things you're not getting away with not serving me one at a hipster bar.
The smaller breweries will always make something different but their consistency is atrocious most of the time.
That said I've appreciated drinking red wine more after drinking an IPA, as it seems to help me get past the tannins quicker.
Sort of like the run-up that red wine gives you to a glass of whisky.
I wanna drink beer, not tea made with hops
It does seem to have swung back a bit over the last few years though. I find people are looking for, "drinkability" over "hoppyness" but that's obviously anticdata.
Larger craft breweries really don't have this luxury. They need to have both a means of production laser focused quality and process oriented folks AND a place for rapid research and development.
What is ironic is when a craft brewery starts reaching size where they can afford these types of benefits they are often demonized for various reasons all having to do with the Brand.
I think the other side of this is that Merlot was very popular. Everyone had already tried the Merlot. Merlot was overrepresented, so, there was like a Merlot "bubble" at the time, in part because of reports on the French Paradox [0], and it being the most popular grape in France and a very popular grape in California and the Finger Lakes. More than the film putting down Merlot, it was praising Pinot Noir. So, you have a movie more or less telling wine drinkers there's another wine you can drink besides Merlot...
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox
(I am not advocating for prohibition or anything like that by the way. Clearly many people enjoy wine, beer and spirits in moderation, although often this follows ingrained sociocultural norms.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/470961/ad-spend-to-sales...
Data for other industries here: http://www.rab.com/research/10014.pdf
Alcohol seems quite popular and has been quite popular for literally millenia, no massive advertising campaigns needed. The alcohol industry is highly competitive, and saturating consumers with ads can certainly influence their choice of which alcohol to buy.
And lest you accuse me of being a lightweight, I regularly enjoy in moderation something actually not that far off from hand sanitizer - cask strength whisky, weighing in at 60+% ABV. Because it is undiluted out of the barrel, it provides an incredibly intense flavor and aroma that I do not need to be tricked into liking.
I think it is a bit more complicated than you make out. The popularity for millenia is really when the only competing beverage was water, and even clean water was hard to get until recently. In recent times, soft drinks and juices have usurped the ubiquity of wine at the dinner table in France for example (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21929287).
Out of interest, what did you think about the whisky the very first time you tried it? Do you think it is likely that without all the notions out there about whisky to do with cachet, heritage, masculinity etc that you would have kept drinking it? That is my point. This is all quite aside from your current experience of drinking whisky, which is of course entirely legitimate and enjoyable of itself. I like beer now but the first time I had it I couldn't get one mouthful down.
Oh, come on. People like to get drunk. It's that simple. That "the only competing beverage was water" is some kind of argument ... get real. That's completely ridiculous. People REALLY REALLY like to get drunk. Water is no competition. Has nothing to do with what the drink tastes like.
A lot of it goes to the fact that bitter, acidic, pungent things are an "acquired taste" in American culture. That's just not true in countries where children grow up with stronger flavors like real unpasteurized cheeses, fermented foods, and offal.
So what you say might be true as far as ad spending influencing the basic, cheese-puff-snorting American, but the premise that alcohol is unpalatable to most people (at least, most people around the world) is a false projection.
My semi-nightly movie time usually involves a bottle of wine (I change up what kind), couple squares of 90% to 100% chocolate, bowl of homemade popcorn, some American Spirit dark rolling tobacco, and a CBD+THC gummy. All those alkaloids roll around your senses like bittersweet heaven.
If you didn't know the speech was from Sideways you'd think Arnett's character is deeply eloquent, and if you did happen to see Sideways recently, you see him for the fraud he is.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCS1Gnwbtp0