WINE IN FICTION

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Consumption, Use, and Customs 

From muse and source of inspiration to becoming a cultural expression in its own right, wine has interacted with various art forms throughout the 20th century and up to the present. This relationship cuts across genres, with wine playing a central and universal role, both as subject matter and protagonist. 

Wine weaves together historical events with disciplines as varied as they are ubiquitous in our day to day: from graphic design, cinema, theatre, and TV to music and literature. Advertising and other forms of cultural expression have also prominently featured wine. Driven by the digital era, they have all contributed to forging a new perception and reality in the representation of wine in contemporary art. Where wine has gained a particularly strong presence is in audiovisual entertainment, becoming a popular and accessible element that has gone from being a pleasure reserved for the few to forming part of popular culture. 

vino y ficción

Wine in Cinema 

  • The notion that cinema reflects life is a widely accepted axiom. It is therefore unsurprising that writers and directors known for their gastronomical passions would incorporate their love of good food and wine into their work.  

  • Few were more adept at displaying their taste and knowledge of wine on screen than the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. In Rope (1948), John Dall drinks a champagne toast to celebrate a crime. “Murder,” he remarks, “Can also be an art.” 

  • The British director was a consummate gourmet and wanted wine to play a central role in his magnificent film Notorious (1946) in which Cary Grant accidentally discovers that a bottle of Pomar 1934 actually contains uranium stored by Nazi spies.  

  • Another cinematic great, Federico Fellini, drew a historical analogy between wine and film: 

“Good wine is like good cinema: it lasts an instant but leaves a glorious taste in its wake; new with each sip, and, as with film, born and reborn on each palate.”  

California, Cinema and Wine 

  • Out of proximity, Hollywood has a special place for Californian wines. For example, the comedy-drama Bottle Shock (2009) in which Alan Rickman plays the famous British sommelier Steven Spurrier. With some creative license, the film tells the story of what became known as the “Judgment of Paris”, a landmark 1976 contest in which Napa Valley wines defeated, for the first time ever, its French counterparts. (Something also achieved by Familia Torres’s Mas La Plana, then known as Gran Coronas Etiqueta Negra.)

  • Another California wine-inspired cult classic is the masterful Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004). The film revolves around two friends, one of whom is about to get married, who go on a trip to bid his bachelorhood farewell.  Miles and Jack. The protagonists’ conflict unfolds in Santa Ynez Valley and is often expressed in vinicultural terms: Jack is fine with a second-tier Merlot whereas Miles is searching for the perfect Pinot Noir, something he tells Maya, another character, whom he wants to seduce with his supposed wine expertise. The movie was a huge boost for Pinot Noirs, which saw sales go through the roof in the region.  

  • As an aside, after The Godfather made him famous, Francis Ford Coppola acquired the Gustave Niebaum estate in Rutherford in 1975. At present, he also owns the former Inglenook winery and in fact finances part of his film projects with the revenue generated by the wine business. 

     

Cinema, TV and Streamers 

  • The everyday reality of wine has reached our lives through many series and sitcoms that populate our screens. Here wine often represents a hedonistic escape; reaffirms a sense of the good life; expresses quotidian socializing between friends and neighbours.  This is unquestionably a significant and well-aimed step towards bringing our object of desire to a wider audience. This includes young adults, the future emissaries of our love of/for wine, who watch their beloved hobbits growing grapes in the Shire; or see how the various regions that make up George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones universe produce different wines.  

“…the reds of the Reach and Dorne, whose strong wine is as dark as blood and as sweet as revenge…” 

  • TV series are the indisputable boom of our time, although as far as wine consumption is concerned, there is still a way to go, regardless of genre, from Mad Men to Big Bang Theory. The trend is to turn wine into a calming agent, a sedative in which characters seek the (socially acceptable) answer to all kinds of problems, from a place of shared solace to a social lubricant. 
  • This might seem like a somewhat simplistic statement, but if we broaden our view, we’ll see that certain codes of conduct persist in characters that are accentuated depending on the type of wine they consume.  
  • So, for example, we’ll see white wine consumption (regardless of genre) associated with moments of well-being, stripped of all narrative tension: a casual conversation among friends, a character drinking a glass while cooking, etc., normally during the day. What it communicates to the audience is a feeling of a healthy pleasurable moment.  

By contrast, red wine is usually drunk by characters in darker moments, a response to a traumatic moment, a way of seeking solace; or moments of deep introspection; or seeking inebriation as a way of emotional survival. Tension and anxiety. Loneliness or solitude. Often red wine stands in for luxury, an element to show off wealth and sophistication in social settings. 

  • This is, of course, a generalized view and exceptions abound. Luckily these are on the rise. What does not seem to change are the consumption moments: white during the day, red at night, something that seems seared into the audiovisual narrative. Aside from a few exceptions, as previously mentioned.  

Much like cinema imitates life, wine seems to be a narrative element whose uses and customs have changed over the years. What remains constant is that life – and movies – are more enjoyable with wine.