It's commonly referred to as the "Judgment of Paris," a blind wine tasting staged thirty-two years ago that pitted a number of French reds and whites against some upstart competitors from California's Napa Valley. The organizer of the event, a British wineshop proprietor named Steven Spurrier, made no secret of his belief in the superiority of the French labels and was shocked (as was the whole wine world) when the results came back and Napa had bested all competitors. Bottle Shock tells the story of that crucial turning point in Napa's history, not only from Spurrier's point of view but also from that of the Napa vintners who reluctantly entered the tasting, despite their suspicion that they were being set up -- on America's bicentennial, no less -- to fail. SuicideGirls recently sat down with Randall Miller and Jody Savin, the husband and wife team of indie filmmakers who felt that this story needed to be told.
Ryan Stewart: While watching the movie, I kept thinking you must have spent half your budget on those sweeping helicopter shots of the Napa Valley.
Randall Miller: No, no, it was four hours of helicopter for the whole movie. You know, you do a movie about this beautiful place and you sort of make a promise to the audience. We labored over this -- can we afford it, can we not afford it -- and it's very expensive but if you don't do it, if you don't have helicopter aerials or anything like that, you don't get a sense of the locale.
Jody Savin: In this movie the land is a character. We were seduced by the land. We had to see it and know what it was and there was sort of no way around that. It would have seemed like such a small movie and you would have cheated the audience if you couldn't show them what this was.
RM: Like with Giant, the George Stevens movie, she's talking and there's the big wide fame. That was the idea all along, to make the movie in a location that really uses that space. The Chateau is too big to just show the whole thing. You have to show these vistas. I think that's part of the lure of the thing. Whatever we could do to make it feel like a vacation, like you want to go there. That's the intention.
RS: A film crew is a very destructive thing -- these vintners must have been nervous about welcoming you in.
RM: Well, it's interesting because these are farmers. You imagine these sort of very elegant, upper-crust people or something, but they're farmers. They could be cabbage farmers, they could be pumpkin growers, but they're farmers. They get farm loans. You're up in those fields and you look around and these are their estate grapes, their best stuff, and there's no water around this stuff and you're like, "Are you torturing these vines?" and they would say, "No, you treat them terrible. You deprive them and then they produce great grapes." So we basically couldn't do anything wrong up there. They've already mistreated the grapes so badly. And you're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, so we're not gonna do much.
JS: But you tell them what you're going to do and they imagine a few actors and a couple of trucks and when you actually do move in it always takes their breath away for a moment, but they rolled with it.
RS: The real people your characters are based on -- did they act as consultants on the film?
RM: Yeah, Bo and Jim [Barrett, the Chateau Montelena vintners whose wine won first place in the taste-testing] did. Heidi Barrett was also enormously helpful, especially with Rachael, because it was very specific, that whole thing of being a woman in that time period, being into wine and trying to be a vintner. Gustavo [another local vintner portrayed in the movie] met with Freddy [Rodriguez] a couple of times. He was a pioneer of that time period. He had come over from Mexico when he was four or something. His dad and members of his family had worked as pickers and assistant wine makers and stuff and he went to UC Davis, which is the Ivy League of wine schools.
RS: It is?
RM: Yeah, there are two schools that they always talk about. UC Davis is the Ivy League and Fresno State is like the community college version. It's like anything -- it was unique that this guy [Gustavo] at that time was going to be considered a real vintner, but now he has his own winery.
RS: The real Steven Spurrier didn't want to be involved in the movie, correct?
JS: He had given his rights to a different movie, so he wasn't even supposed to talk to us. Alan had met him before and Heidi Barrett's sister had worked for him for years, so there were a lot of people that had had a lot of contact with him.
RS: Was he steeped in all the science of it or was he just a shopkeeper and an oenophile?
JS: Spurrier was a guy from an affluent British family and was really into wine. He was wandering around Paris one day, he had family money, and he saw this little wine shop and he wanted it. He wanted to make a go of it; it was his dream. So he made this woman an offer and she was very proprietary about it, she said that she would sell it to him if he basically did an apprenticeship with her. So he worked under her for a while and she sold it to him. She turned it over to him and he made a go of it.
RM: He had a small room in his basement where he would have classes, to teach people about wine. The wineshop is actually smaller than it is in the movie. In the movie it's small, but in real life it was even smaller, with boxes everywhere stacked up. There are pictures of him in these very confined, tight spaces.
RS: Was this whole wine-tasting event detrimental to his career?
JS: In the short run. It hurt him in France. He was certainly a pariah in France for a couple of years, but ultimately he is a hero to the wine world. There's no doubting that, whether he backed into this randomly or did it by design, he single-handedly caused the democratization and the globalization of wine. Alan Rickman has had wines all over the world that he talks about and they certainly make wines in India and China. I don't know how easy it is for us to get them, but he said that some of the best wine he's ever had was in the Republic of Georgia.
RM: It may have happened anyway, but in history there's always that first stone, the first thing that causes a war or causes anything. This was the thing that happened and the really amazing thing was that he got all these critics, these well-known wine critics, people, snobs, whatever you want to call them, from France, he got them all there but he could only get one reporter. He got this guy, George Taber, who at that point had had articles published but never with his name.
JS: Even on this, the famous article, he didn't have a byline.
RM: And it wasn't in the front of Time Magazine, it was like page sixty-something, small article. Two weeks after it hits all the California wines sell out in New York, L.A. and Chicago. That's what started Napa. Now after that there was a 60 Minutes piece and some other things that happened, but if that hadn't happened, none of it would have happened.
RS: I assume that in today's wine world there's more communication between the regions.
RM: Bo talks about how there are no borders anymore. They don't see it as American vs. French or Australian. There's a guy working there from New Zealand who is like his assistant winemaker and there's another guy from France. It's really interesting that way; they go to functions with each other. He's definitely a good ol' boy American surfer dude guy, but it's not like you would imagine it. He tends to be fairly liberal, his dad's kind of conservative but even he loves certain French wines. They all try to work with each other and they all know each other. I think before there wasn't as much interaction as everyone has with each other [now] and also the import/export thing wasn't as easy. They didn't have ways to get all of each others' stuff. Now they all work together and some of the French try to make wine in the California style and vice versa.
RS: Chris Pine, who of course plays Bo, went and landed the role of Captain Kirk after doing this. What does that do for you?
RM: The best thing that can happen is that people really like his performance and then in the next movie, instead of saying, "Oh, he's Captain Kirk in Star Trek" they go, "No, he's a really good actor and he's Captain Kirk in Star Trek." Like with Christian Bale; he's a great actor and he's Batman.
RS: Getting back to Spurrier, I understand that Alan was resistant to the idea of him being referred to as a snob by the other characters.
RM: He had a hard time when we were talking about the whole snob thing; he wasn't keen on the whole concept of us calling him a snob. It was a point where we said, "We have to have this in here." It really informs his character to say that. I don't think he's really a snob, I think that's just who he is. He's not aware that he's a snob. He says, "You think I'm an asshole, but I'm not, I'm just British."
JS: Yeah, we see it from our point of view as snobby.
RM: But he doesn't see himself as a snob, he's just very specific about what he's trying to do. He came over, obviously, with a preconceived notion that the French would be better, but I hope it's evident in the movie -- and we tried to be very subtle about it -- that somewhere along the way he realizes that this wine is pretty good. He's trying to be as egalitarian about the whole thing as he possibly can, like a documentary. He's trying to just document it and say, "Here's the wine and let's make this as even as possible." He doesn't expect the outcome; he's surprised when it happens.
RS: Very surprised, I guess, since he did it again thirty years later and the outcome was the same, right?
RM: It's true that it happened again. He did it again, but he's heroic, really. He did a lot for a lot of people. The wine business in the 70s was something like four million in revenue in California and now it's like nine billion. It's an enormous business. It's crazy.
RS: All because of this one event.
JS: It was the snowball that caused the avalanche. It probably would have happened anyway because there were people up there making wine, but it just went from obscurity to sexy. Bang.
RS: Do you agree with the statement in the film that great wine is a great art?
JS: Definitely. It's very subjective and it's actually one of the things that drew us to the material. Jim Barrett made a lot of sacrifices to pursue this art form and I think he saw it as an art form. Being a lawyer was just work to him and it wasn't making him happy. He had this dream and it was an artistic dream and he went off to do it. By hook or by crook, he was going to try this and risk everything in the process. That's what we chose to do a few years ago when we made Marilyn Hotchkiss. We took the money out of our house to make that movie. Randy wakes me up in the middle of the night one night and he says, "If you don't believe in yourself, no one will ever believe in you." I was like, "Oh, God ..."
RM: She bought it, though.
JS: Yeah, even though he used a cliche. You only get one shot at this life of yours, so if you have a dream ... we responded to that. It's chemistry, it's agriculture, it's so many things and in the end they all come together, especially the way they do it. Handcrafted wine is an art form.
RM: Each barrel is different. In each one of these rows there's like forty barrels and Bo will walk down the rows and go, "Oakey ... smokey ... tart." He's familiar with each barrel. He's been tasting them over time. Then he'll go, "Let's mix one, two, three, take a little of four ... like that."
JS: I couldn't do that. I don't think you can teach that in schools, so it's not like a learned science.
RM: It's not just about how it tastes now, it's about how it tastes in the future. It's in the barrel for years. And the flavor has to be consistent, year-to-year. People don't want to buy your wine and then be like, "This doesn't taste like last year." That's tough.
RS: I'm sure it takes enormous skill.
RM: Bo Barrett said to us recently that the wine business is like moviemaking -- you can make a good wine and it doesn't cost that much to make a good wine, but to sell a good wine is really expensive. You gotta market it. You can get your wine into stores, but you can't get people to taste it -- there are thousands of bottles on the shelves. How are they gonna taste yours? There's got to be some marketing going on, gotta get somebody to taste it. To get people to taste it you have to give a lot away. It's the same way with movies. You can make a movie and it can be great and you can win Sundance, but if you don't figure out a way to market it nobody sees it. Two years later people will come up to you and go, "That was a really good movie, how come it didn't get out?"
RS: As hard as it is to get a movie made, why do you two wear so many hats on your projects? You produce, write, edit, direct, the whole nine.
RM: It's a combination of desperation --
JS: -- and poverty.
RM: We do like to have control, because we went for years doing things for other people and you do get frustrated, but we're the cheapest people we could find. When you make a deal with actors' agents and they're like, "My actor should get so and so!" you can be like, "Here is the budget. I'll show you what I'm making. They're gonna make more than me." There's no better negotiation than that, you know? What are they gonna say? So you get to this place where you're like, how can we make the movies we wanna make, for the right reasons, for the passion? What are the stories we wanna tell? This is hopefully a feel-good movie at a time when, you know, it's a tough time in America right now. We're saying it's okay to be American in this movie, but not in a ra-ra, "go, war!" thing or a sports thing or something. It's in a subtle, kind of Billy Elliott way. It was a little moment that helped the rest of the world. It's not just for us, it's for everybody.
Bottle Shock opens in limited release today. For more info, check out the official site.
Ryan Stewart: While watching the movie, I kept thinking you must have spent half your budget on those sweeping helicopter shots of the Napa Valley.
Randall Miller: No, no, it was four hours of helicopter for the whole movie. You know, you do a movie about this beautiful place and you sort of make a promise to the audience. We labored over this -- can we afford it, can we not afford it -- and it's very expensive but if you don't do it, if you don't have helicopter aerials or anything like that, you don't get a sense of the locale.
Jody Savin: In this movie the land is a character. We were seduced by the land. We had to see it and know what it was and there was sort of no way around that. It would have seemed like such a small movie and you would have cheated the audience if you couldn't show them what this was.
RM: Like with Giant, the George Stevens movie, she's talking and there's the big wide fame. That was the idea all along, to make the movie in a location that really uses that space. The Chateau is too big to just show the whole thing. You have to show these vistas. I think that's part of the lure of the thing. Whatever we could do to make it feel like a vacation, like you want to go there. That's the intention.
RS: A film crew is a very destructive thing -- these vintners must have been nervous about welcoming you in.
RM: Well, it's interesting because these are farmers. You imagine these sort of very elegant, upper-crust people or something, but they're farmers. They could be cabbage farmers, they could be pumpkin growers, but they're farmers. They get farm loans. You're up in those fields and you look around and these are their estate grapes, their best stuff, and there's no water around this stuff and you're like, "Are you torturing these vines?" and they would say, "No, you treat them terrible. You deprive them and then they produce great grapes." So we basically couldn't do anything wrong up there. They've already mistreated the grapes so badly. And you're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, so we're not gonna do much.
JS: But you tell them what you're going to do and they imagine a few actors and a couple of trucks and when you actually do move in it always takes their breath away for a moment, but they rolled with it.
RS: The real people your characters are based on -- did they act as consultants on the film?
RM: Yeah, Bo and Jim [Barrett, the Chateau Montelena vintners whose wine won first place in the taste-testing] did. Heidi Barrett was also enormously helpful, especially with Rachael, because it was very specific, that whole thing of being a woman in that time period, being into wine and trying to be a vintner. Gustavo [another local vintner portrayed in the movie] met with Freddy [Rodriguez] a couple of times. He was a pioneer of that time period. He had come over from Mexico when he was four or something. His dad and members of his family had worked as pickers and assistant wine makers and stuff and he went to UC Davis, which is the Ivy League of wine schools.
RS: It is?
RM: Yeah, there are two schools that they always talk about. UC Davis is the Ivy League and Fresno State is like the community college version. It's like anything -- it was unique that this guy [Gustavo] at that time was going to be considered a real vintner, but now he has his own winery.
RS: The real Steven Spurrier didn't want to be involved in the movie, correct?
JS: He had given his rights to a different movie, so he wasn't even supposed to talk to us. Alan had met him before and Heidi Barrett's sister had worked for him for years, so there were a lot of people that had had a lot of contact with him.
RS: Was he steeped in all the science of it or was he just a shopkeeper and an oenophile?
JS: Spurrier was a guy from an affluent British family and was really into wine. He was wandering around Paris one day, he had family money, and he saw this little wine shop and he wanted it. He wanted to make a go of it; it was his dream. So he made this woman an offer and she was very proprietary about it, she said that she would sell it to him if he basically did an apprenticeship with her. So he worked under her for a while and she sold it to him. She turned it over to him and he made a go of it.
RM: He had a small room in his basement where he would have classes, to teach people about wine. The wineshop is actually smaller than it is in the movie. In the movie it's small, but in real life it was even smaller, with boxes everywhere stacked up. There are pictures of him in these very confined, tight spaces.
RS: Was this whole wine-tasting event detrimental to his career?
JS: In the short run. It hurt him in France. He was certainly a pariah in France for a couple of years, but ultimately he is a hero to the wine world. There's no doubting that, whether he backed into this randomly or did it by design, he single-handedly caused the democratization and the globalization of wine. Alan Rickman has had wines all over the world that he talks about and they certainly make wines in India and China. I don't know how easy it is for us to get them, but he said that some of the best wine he's ever had was in the Republic of Georgia.
RM: It may have happened anyway, but in history there's always that first stone, the first thing that causes a war or causes anything. This was the thing that happened and the really amazing thing was that he got all these critics, these well-known wine critics, people, snobs, whatever you want to call them, from France, he got them all there but he could only get one reporter. He got this guy, George Taber, who at that point had had articles published but never with his name.
JS: Even on this, the famous article, he didn't have a byline.
RM: And it wasn't in the front of Time Magazine, it was like page sixty-something, small article. Two weeks after it hits all the California wines sell out in New York, L.A. and Chicago. That's what started Napa. Now after that there was a 60 Minutes piece and some other things that happened, but if that hadn't happened, none of it would have happened.
RS: I assume that in today's wine world there's more communication between the regions.
RM: Bo talks about how there are no borders anymore. They don't see it as American vs. French or Australian. There's a guy working there from New Zealand who is like his assistant winemaker and there's another guy from France. It's really interesting that way; they go to functions with each other. He's definitely a good ol' boy American surfer dude guy, but it's not like you would imagine it. He tends to be fairly liberal, his dad's kind of conservative but even he loves certain French wines. They all try to work with each other and they all know each other. I think before there wasn't as much interaction as everyone has with each other [now] and also the import/export thing wasn't as easy. They didn't have ways to get all of each others' stuff. Now they all work together and some of the French try to make wine in the California style and vice versa.
RS: Chris Pine, who of course plays Bo, went and landed the role of Captain Kirk after doing this. What does that do for you?
RM: The best thing that can happen is that people really like his performance and then in the next movie, instead of saying, "Oh, he's Captain Kirk in Star Trek" they go, "No, he's a really good actor and he's Captain Kirk in Star Trek." Like with Christian Bale; he's a great actor and he's Batman.
RS: Getting back to Spurrier, I understand that Alan was resistant to the idea of him being referred to as a snob by the other characters.
RM: He had a hard time when we were talking about the whole snob thing; he wasn't keen on the whole concept of us calling him a snob. It was a point where we said, "We have to have this in here." It really informs his character to say that. I don't think he's really a snob, I think that's just who he is. He's not aware that he's a snob. He says, "You think I'm an asshole, but I'm not, I'm just British."
JS: Yeah, we see it from our point of view as snobby.
RM: But he doesn't see himself as a snob, he's just very specific about what he's trying to do. He came over, obviously, with a preconceived notion that the French would be better, but I hope it's evident in the movie -- and we tried to be very subtle about it -- that somewhere along the way he realizes that this wine is pretty good. He's trying to be as egalitarian about the whole thing as he possibly can, like a documentary. He's trying to just document it and say, "Here's the wine and let's make this as even as possible." He doesn't expect the outcome; he's surprised when it happens.
RS: Very surprised, I guess, since he did it again thirty years later and the outcome was the same, right?
RM: It's true that it happened again. He did it again, but he's heroic, really. He did a lot for a lot of people. The wine business in the 70s was something like four million in revenue in California and now it's like nine billion. It's an enormous business. It's crazy.
RS: All because of this one event.
JS: It was the snowball that caused the avalanche. It probably would have happened anyway because there were people up there making wine, but it just went from obscurity to sexy. Bang.
RS: Do you agree with the statement in the film that great wine is a great art?
JS: Definitely. It's very subjective and it's actually one of the things that drew us to the material. Jim Barrett made a lot of sacrifices to pursue this art form and I think he saw it as an art form. Being a lawyer was just work to him and it wasn't making him happy. He had this dream and it was an artistic dream and he went off to do it. By hook or by crook, he was going to try this and risk everything in the process. That's what we chose to do a few years ago when we made Marilyn Hotchkiss. We took the money out of our house to make that movie. Randy wakes me up in the middle of the night one night and he says, "If you don't believe in yourself, no one will ever believe in you." I was like, "Oh, God ..."
RM: She bought it, though.
JS: Yeah, even though he used a cliche. You only get one shot at this life of yours, so if you have a dream ... we responded to that. It's chemistry, it's agriculture, it's so many things and in the end they all come together, especially the way they do it. Handcrafted wine is an art form.
RM: Each barrel is different. In each one of these rows there's like forty barrels and Bo will walk down the rows and go, "Oakey ... smokey ... tart." He's familiar with each barrel. He's been tasting them over time. Then he'll go, "Let's mix one, two, three, take a little of four ... like that."
JS: I couldn't do that. I don't think you can teach that in schools, so it's not like a learned science.
RM: It's not just about how it tastes now, it's about how it tastes in the future. It's in the barrel for years. And the flavor has to be consistent, year-to-year. People don't want to buy your wine and then be like, "This doesn't taste like last year." That's tough.
RS: I'm sure it takes enormous skill.
RM: Bo Barrett said to us recently that the wine business is like moviemaking -- you can make a good wine and it doesn't cost that much to make a good wine, but to sell a good wine is really expensive. You gotta market it. You can get your wine into stores, but you can't get people to taste it -- there are thousands of bottles on the shelves. How are they gonna taste yours? There's got to be some marketing going on, gotta get somebody to taste it. To get people to taste it you have to give a lot away. It's the same way with movies. You can make a movie and it can be great and you can win Sundance, but if you don't figure out a way to market it nobody sees it. Two years later people will come up to you and go, "That was a really good movie, how come it didn't get out?"
RS: As hard as it is to get a movie made, why do you two wear so many hats on your projects? You produce, write, edit, direct, the whole nine.
RM: It's a combination of desperation --
JS: -- and poverty.
RM: We do like to have control, because we went for years doing things for other people and you do get frustrated, but we're the cheapest people we could find. When you make a deal with actors' agents and they're like, "My actor should get so and so!" you can be like, "Here is the budget. I'll show you what I'm making. They're gonna make more than me." There's no better negotiation than that, you know? What are they gonna say? So you get to this place where you're like, how can we make the movies we wanna make, for the right reasons, for the passion? What are the stories we wanna tell? This is hopefully a feel-good movie at a time when, you know, it's a tough time in America right now. We're saying it's okay to be American in this movie, but not in a ra-ra, "go, war!" thing or a sports thing or something. It's in a subtle, kind of Billy Elliott way. It was a little moment that helped the rest of the world. It's not just for us, it's for everybody.
Bottle Shock opens in limited release today. For more info, check out the official site.
courtneyriot:
It's commonly referred to as the "Judgment of Paris," a blind wine tasting staged thirty-two years ago that pitted a number of French reds and whites against some upstart competitors from California's Napa Valley. The organizer of the event, a British wineshop proprietor named Steven Spurrier, made...
squee_:
Sounds interesting. I doubt it will be shown anywhere near me though. Probably have to wait for the DVD.