IF THERE’S ANYTHING MORE FUN to write about than movies, it’s wine. Critiquing the perfect wine—taking a deep sniff, swirling the glass to let the air release the depth of flavour, and indulging in its bouquet—offers great practice for exploring creative tasting notes. For this critic, the ideal glass might be a pinot noir from Patagonia with hints of cherry, dirt, and tobacco, especially with a bowl of truffle chips. Alternatively, a seafood grill on a summer night goes best with a dry sauvignon blanc that drinks like chomping on apricot, lime, and passion fruit, and then licking the juice drippings off a nice chalky rock. And for the movie buff, there’s nothing like a fine chardonnay that resembles buttered popcorn.
Wine and movies are the perfect pairing, yet wine itself occupies surprisingly little space in the ever-popular world of food documentaries. Sure, glasses of wine are plentiful in docu-tainment series and lifestyle shows, like Stanley Tucci’s terrific Searching for Italy (2021–22) and, most notably, Matthew Goode and Matthew Rhys’ globe-trotting series The Wine Show (2016–). But a good feature-length documentary about wine can be as rare as ’92 Screaming Eagle cab sauv.
Documentary’s Sideways?
Cinephiles searching for a wine canon should start around 2004. On the dramatic front, Alexander Payne’s Sideways remains the great wine film of all time, having wowed the fall festival crowd that year with its drolly observant portrait of wine enthusiasts who rightly made merlot a dinner party punchline. (Its 2009 Japanese remake Saidoweizu is a worthwhile novelty, too.)
Documentary, however, set the palette for wine earlier, Jonathan Nossiter’s popped some bottles on the Croisette while delivering cinema’s first great wine movie. It also has the distinction of being the first documentary to win the Palme Dog, an honour shared by the many pooches who appear throughout the film.
