Blame it on Rioja

I really liked Sideways, Alexander Payne’s twisted California Wine Country road picture, which came out in 2004. I loved Virginia Madsen’s character; when she talked about wine on screen, I wanted shout out, “Marry me, please!”—how’s that for suspension of disbelief? The restaurant double-date scene still haunts me to this day, joining the likes of the “Sister Christian” scene in P.T. Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights on my short list of favorite movie scenes in the last decade. Seamlessly cross-cut between dinner and its drunk-dialing outcome, the double-date scene is surely the most realistic depiction of anxiety-fueled alcoholic overindulgence in the history of cinema.

Museo de la Cultura del Vino Dinastía Vivanco

But man, I just hated the way Miles—the character played by Paul Giamatti—tasted and talked about wine. It made me cringe, actually. His ultra-seriousness and dorky elucidations to his clueless friend, and, especially, the way he put his nose deep into the glass as if he was trying to snort it—that drove me more than a little crazy. I wondered if the filmmaker and his co-writer had done their homework.

But Miles acquitted himself admirably at the end of the film, when he drank a bottle of 1961 Château Cheval-Blanc (which, as most wine geeks have pointed out, has Merlot in the blend) out of a Styrofoam cup at a diner—a precious liquid consumed without the slightest trace of pomp or pretense: the way wine should always be enjoyed. It was a gesture that revealed his heart’s true relationship with one of the most beautiful products of nature: all the talk of coffee and raspberries was gone; wine’s soul-soothing properties had triumphed just when he really needed it, during one of his life’s darkest moments. It was also a triumph that dovetailed with his character’s transformation. A truly great moment in the marriage of wine and film.

I was struck by these thoughts last fall when I sat down to watch “Brindis por el Cine” (A Toast to Film), a short (13-minute) video tribute to the marriage of wine and cinema, tucked away inside a darkened alcove within the superlative Dinastía Vivanco Museum of Wine Culture, located just outside the town of Briones in La Rioja. Just a few meters from Picasso’s 1960 lithograph, “Homage to Bacchus,” “Brindis” weaves wine-related scenes from movies made all over the world with comments from Spain’s top actors and directors on the richly rewarding pleasures of wine (a project presumably inspired by the glass of wine each held.)

As the scenes flashed by—exploding magnums of Veuve Cliquot in Babette’s Feast (1987), Cary Grant snooping around in Claude Rains’ wine cellar in Notorious (1946), Carmelo Gómez delivering a moving tribute to viticulture in Julio Medem’s Tierra (1996), while the gorgeous Emma Suárez looks on—I got almost as giddy as the talking heads on the screen, only I hadn’t had any wine. It was like that scene in Cinema Paradiso, you know which one I mean. But instead kisses, I had wine.

King Juan Carlos I inaugurated the Dinastía Vivanco Museum—the Vivanco wine-making family’s gift to the region that made them rich—in 2004, too soon for curators to include scenes from Sideways. Perhaps when it’s time to update this beautiful tribute, the Styrofoam scene will make the cut.I can’t imagine it wouldn’t.

Museo de la Cultura del Vino Dinastía VivancoCrta. Nacionl 232, Km442

26330 Briones, La Rioja – España

T + 34 941 322 323

infomuseo@dinastiavivanco.es

www.dinastiavivanco.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 12:33 am and is filed under Film, General, Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.