“Quaffable, but far from transcendent.” “You don’t understand my plight.” And, of course: “I am not drinking any [expletive] Merlot!” The 2004 film “Sideways” showed us the fundamentals of wine appreciation — how to assess, taste, and talk about it with authority. It shaped public consciousness around wine, teaching us to swish and tip our glasses and proclaim our judgments, just as the main character Miles (Paul Giamatti) would do. It also boosted the reputation (and price) of Pinot Noir wines, Miles’s favorite grape, and nearly killed the market for Merlot wines. Yet viewed 20 years after its release, “Sideways” looks less like a celebration of wine culture and more like a referendum on the absolutism of good taste.
For those who need a refresher: Adapted from the novel by Rex Pickett, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s Oscar-winning screenplay chronicles a week-long road trip through Santa Barbara wine country. The oenophile Miles offers the trip as a bachelor party to his friend Jack (Thomas Hayden Church), who is intent on “cutting loose” pre-wedding. Their disagreements come to a head when they meet Maya, a waitress and horticulture student played by Virginia Madsen, and Stephanie, a vineyard wine pourer played by Sandra Oh. The film’s romantic plots — Jack’s affair with Stephanie, Miles’s awkward courtship of Maya — can be seen as metaphors for wine appreciation. Are people meant to play by the rules, follow well-established criteria for a good life? Or, as Maya suggests to Miles, should we open the bottle when it peaks, the rules be damned?
In 2004, Sideways represented a tipping point for elite food and wine culture. Zachary Sussman, wine expert and author of “The Essential Wine Book” (2020), thinks of the film “as a kind of a time capsule,” released right as the broader culture was shifting “from signifying status through conspicuous consumption to a new kind of authenticity fetish.” The year 2004 was the birth of the new restaurant cool, when trendy places like Momofuku Noodle Bar and The Spotted Pig displaced fine dining temples like Lutèce and La Caravelle. It was also a seismic year in the wine industry, as two of California’s most prominent wineries, Robert Mondavi Winery and the Chalone Wine Group, were sold. The power structure of the wine industry was overdue for a referendum, and the documentary “Mondovino” openly criticized tastemakers like the critic Robert Parker for elevating wine knowledge (and sales) to the point of inaccessibility. (One of the film’s featured wines, a Romanée-Conti Richebourg, now retails for more than $4,000.)
Twenty years later, we know enough about taste to ask different questions, and trust ourselves to find the answers. Though “Sideways” centers mostly on the indulgences of men, it’s the women — both wine industry workers — who offer the best guide to wine appreciation. Viewed in the context of #MeToo, Maya’s famous monologue dismantles Miles’s arrogance, reminding him that there’s more than one way to enjoy a bottle. She thinks about the year each bottle’s grapes were harvested, “how the sun was shining, or if it rained. … all those people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now.” Maya’s perspective reflects the modern foodie’s attention to the larger ethics of food production, to the growers, pickers, truckers, and servers who make each gourmet encounter possible. Maya’s take is also distinctly gendered. As Amanda Schuster, a New York-based writer and trained sommelier, observed “that idea of life and plants and the organism in the glass . . . the men weren’t experiencing that at all.” Maya’s approach to wine is more modern and reflects the way people can learn about wine today. As Sussman noted, less emphasis on formal criteria is a good thing, and it matters far more that people get “engaged and excited about what they’re drinking, where it comes from, and why it matters.”
So what do we do with a film that, despite its lingering pleasures, shows where we’ve been rather than where we’re going? Ara Sarkissian, certified wine and instructor in the Food Studies Programs at Boston University, says the film’s sneaky power emerges from its “disrespect of the establishment. So much consumer behavior can be based on doing what the wine magazines tell you; a movie like this shows that you can have your own opinion.” Even if we occasionally clamor for expert guidance, “Sideways” suggests that we, like Miles, might benefit from a less rigid approach to wine appreciation. When Miles uncorks a prized 1961 Cheval Blanc (approximately 40 percent Merlot) in a fast-food restaurant, some in 2004 might have read it as him hitting rock bottom. Yet today Schuster says that it’s “him reaching bliss. … It’s a real bon vivant move, the ultimate indulgence.”
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