Based on actual events, Bottle Shock is a David versus Goliath tale, a yarn that wouldn’t be believed if it weren’t true. In a month not known for good films, here is an unexpected August darling.

The year is 1976 and as America prepares to celebrate its bicentennial, one of the greatest intercultural showdowns of history is brewing…er, fermenting. Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) is a British expatriate living in Paris who owns a respected but unfrequented wine shop. Desperate to garner some business, Spurrier decides to take a trip to California’s not-yet-famous Napa Valley where some are claiming that the upstart Americans are producing wines to rival the untouchable French vintages.

Thanks to an uncooperative car, Spurrier is brought into contact with vintner Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), an ex-lawyer who has risked all he has to create the perfect chardonnay at his floundering vineyard, Chateau Montelena. An inflexible perfectionist, Jim has little patience for his good-for-nothing, hippie son Bo (Chris Pine) much less a snobby Englishman who, he is convinced, is out to embarrass him.

But Bo isn’t so sure. Together with best friend Gustavo (Freddy Rodríguez) and gorgeous intern Sam (Rachael Taylor), Bo shows Spurrier around the valley, introducing him to the best California has to offer. Shocked at the quality of what he’s discovered, Spurrier proposes a plan—returning to Paris for a blind taste test competition. Do the fledgling American grapes stand a chance against the imperious and impervious French? History remembers this great clash of civilizations as the “Judgment of Paris,” an event that changed the course of wine history forever.

Bottle Shock believes that wine is art every bit as moving and powerful as literature, music or painting. The film is a love letter to the sun-dappled California wine country in which it is shot, as well as the plucky and innovative American artisans who changed the industry forever, putting Napa on the map.

This film isn’t Sideways, though it will appeal to the same sort of crowd. Like Sideways, Bottle Shock draws metaphors between the maturation of grapes and men. The best grapes are weaned, counterintuitively, in arid, moisture-deprived soil. It is in the fight for their very survival that the grapes take on the flavor and consistency worthy of the finest wines. The more comfortable the growing environment, the less developed the grape. So it is with some people. It is only in the crucible of adversity that some people find themselves and their calling.

If all this sounds like Bottle Shock is a relentlessly serious film, take heart. This is a charming and consistently funny movie, one that understands that people love to hate snobs and that, for Americans at least, there is no snob like a French snob. Yet even Spurrier cannot help but come away from Napa and the Americans he met there, unchanged. “You’re a snob,” Jim Barrett tells him at one point, “It limits you.”

Bottle Shock is an intimate indie, but that didn’t stop director Randall Miller and cinematographer Mike Ozier from filling the film with sun-dappled visuals and sweeping aerials. At times the film feels like a cinematic scratch and sniff—you feel the dirt beneath your fingertips, you smell the grapes wafting on the warm breeze, you taste the silkiness of the wine as it slides luxuriously down your throat. Even if you are not a wine connoisseur, by the end of this film you’ll understand what Galileo meant when he said: “Wine is sunlight held together by water.” Bottle Shock is a feel good movie in the best possible way. You’ll want to bottle this feeling and take it home with you.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved