What is your favorite film about wine? I’m thinking of movies or TV films that feature wine as a theme, plot, or background. To make my list, a film has to get the wine part right and not rely solely on stereotypes about wine or wine lovers. For this discussion at least, I’m excluding documentaries. is aimed at the oenoscenti or films that are meant to teach us something about wine. These are films that tell a story in which wine plays a role.
We’re starting with a new entry, so pour yourself a glass of bubbly and travel back two centuries with me to meet a woman who helped make champagne France’s famous luxury drink. Then we’ll road trip through Southern California’s wine country, enjoy a romantic affair in Provence, and see how wine-fueled greed and ambition lead to murder. Finally, we’ll take a look at Napa Valley’s pioneering days in the 1970s.
Do you have a favorite wine movie that isn’t on this list? Maybe wine isn’t the main character, but it does have a cameo. James Bond’s wine knowledge helped him take down his opponents in Diamonds Are Forever and From Russia with Love. Dennis Quaid played an honorable winemaker in Disney’s The Twins. Let us know your favorites in the comments.
“The Widow Clicquot” (2024)
This film (now in cinemas) tells the story of Barbe Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the legendary head of the champagne house we now know as Veuve Clicquot. It tells how, in 1805, when her husband died suddenly, Ponsardin inherited the ailing winery at the age of 27 and turned it into a major business – and along the way developed innovations that shape today’s champagne.
Widow Clicquot isn’t actually about wine. It’s the story of a female entrepreneur who succeeds in a man’s world, battling restrictive laws and rampant misogyny. Her business happens to be wine, and she happens to be really good at it. The film understands wine and its history – we see how early champagne producers struggled with exploding bottles and how a lost vintage could threaten a struggling company.
We see Barbe Nicole, portrayed with stoic determination by Haley Bennett, creating the first known vintage-dated champagne and the first known rosé champagne blend. She is also said to have developed the riddling technique—the slow manipulation and tilting of a bottle to move the yeast sediment to the neck of the bottle where it can be disgorged. Ponsardin was innovative in marketing, decorating her bottles with a yellow bow, a detail that later became the iconic yellow label of Veuve Clicquot champagne. (Veuve means “widow” in French). She also built an export market in Russia after the blockade on importing French goods into the country was lifted—no easy feat considering Napoleon’s war with the country. These achievements earned her the nickname “La Grande Dame de la Champagne.”
Throughout the film, Barbe Nicole’s antagonist is her neighbor, Monsieur Jean-Remy Moët, another famous name in the history of champagne. A miser who, like most of the men in the film, is convinced that a woman cannot and should not be in charge of a winery, and he schemes to force her to sell him her best vineyards. Today, of course, Veuve Clicquot is part of the LVMH luxury empire, so the house eventually came under the Moët umbrella.
“Sideways” (2004)
Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, Alexander Payne’s film, which depicts a road trip with friends gone wrong, took us to the Santa Barbara wine country and sparked a national love affair with Pinot Noir. Beautiful vineyard landscapes, including places we can visit, combined with unforgettable dialogue that leaves a lasting impression. An entire generation can’t say “Merlot” without adding a curse word to this film, and wine geeks still rave about Madsen’s monologue about the romantic transience of wine.
“A Good Year” (2006)
In this romantic comedy, Russell Crowe escapes the London rat race to discover himself and wine on a family estate in Provence. (Director Ridley Scott owns his own vineyard, Mas des Infirmières, in the South of France.) Crowe tries to uncover the secret of his estate’s best wine, a lesson in terroir, and falls in love with Marion Cotillard along the way. It’s a very ambitious film.
“In the storm as in any port” (1973)
There is much debate over whether Columbo was an episodic television series or a series of TV movies, or both. Definitions aside, the film certainly feels like a movie, and this Columbo film, part of NBC’s mystery movie franchise in the 1970s, was star Peter Falk’s favorite film, according to IMDb. It features a familiar if somewhat stereotypical plot: Donald Pleasence plays Adrian Carsini, a stuffy, pompous winemaker dedicated to making world-class wine without regard to cost or profit, who kills his playboy half-brother when he threatens to sell the winery to the Marino brothers — Ernest and Julio Gallo. Columbo learns about wine in order to ingratiate himself with Carsini and get him to incriminate himself. There are a few laughs for wine lovers: Carsini is seen leaving his quality-conscious boutique winery, with a row of huge fermentation tanks in the background, no doubt filled with the popular cheap wine he detests. And in the final scene, Carsini congratulates Columbo on his choice of “zinFANdle” because he mispronounced the grape. These are just minor quibbles in an otherwise highly entertaining 90 minutes of television. And it’s almost certainly the only Columbo film with a nod to Titian.
“Bottle Shock” (2008)
This film purports to tell the story of the 1976 Judgment of Paris wine tasting, in which California wines triumphed over some of the best French wines. Don’t rely on it as a historical account: Bottle Shock tracks only the winning white wine, the Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena, and ignores the Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, which triumphed among the reds. Alan Rickman portrays Steven Spurrier, the jovial wine merchant who organized the tasting, as a skeptical, sneering British snob. Under his leadership, he became one of the world’s leading wine writers. The film captures the pioneering spirit of Napa Valley in the mid-1970s, when vintners were still finding their way, Cabernet was not yet king and the valley had not yet been transformed into a Disney-like wine theme park. The film’s makers recently released Bottle Shock: The Wine Game. It combines blind tastings with role-playing and even deception and could be a nice change of pace after watching a movie.
