Word: winings
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This much of the story is true: In 1976, an English wine merchant named Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), operating out of a small shop in Paris, is consistently snubbed by the insular and snooty French oenophile establishment. So he sets out to prove that offerings from other countries, which he unsuccessfully stocks, can equal those of the previously unchallenged French vintages. This leads him to California's Napa Valley, where he seeks wines that might fare well in a blind tasting he plans to stage in France. There he finds, among other good wines, a Chardonnay bottled by cranky...
...Double check. Does he have a rival for his affections in Gustavo (Freddy Rodriquez), who also happens to be a promising (and very soulful) vintner himself? Triple check. You can bet that crisis comes to the Barretts, in the form of an apparent failure of their potentially prize-winning wine, which - we're running out of check marks here - brings out the best in everyone...
...That "Lafayette, we are here" spin was more than welcome in 1976, America's bicentennial year. It is also true that the internationalization and democratization of the wine business that almost immediately followed was probably a nice breath of fresh air in what had been a tightly sealed cellar. But still, the lack of authentic surprise and eccentricity in the story and its characters, the sense that everyone concerned with the picture (possibly excepting Rickman, who projects an unwelcoming sullenness that may not be funny but is at least weirdly human) is eagerly looking for the easy...
...their all-night parties, theancient Greeks played a game called Kottabos, which involved flinging the residue from the bottom of their cups of wine at a target. Kottabos was probably the first drinking game to get really, really big--supposedly even Socrates played. Today young philosophers still like to mix booze and projectiles. Only now they call it beer pong...
Recently, the terroir concept - that a wine should express the specific soil, microclimate and cultural traditions that produced it - has become more widespread in the Champagne region. In exceptionally good years, some houses are now producing vintage wines profiling a single year's harvest, or single-vineyard wines made from a particularly outstanding parcel. But not without controversy: at the Champagne Information Bureau's annual tasting in London in March, some winemakers wrote off the single-vintage mono-parcel champagnes as a ploy to market novelties as luxuries...