The five best movies about wine

What’s your favorite wine movie? I’m thinking of films made for theater or TV that feature wine as a theme, plotline or backdrop. To make my list, a film needs to get the wine part right, and not rely entirely on stereotypes about wine or wine lovers. For this discussion at least, I’m excluding documentaries aimed at the oenoscenti or movies meant to teach us about wine. These are films that tell a story with wine involved.

We start with a new entry, so pour yourself a glass of bubbly and travel with me back two centuries to meet a woman who helped build champagne into France’s celebrated luxury tipple. Then we’ll take a road trip through southern California wine country, enjoy a romantic fling in Provence, and see how wine-fueled greed and ambition lead to murder. Finally, we’ll drop in on Napa Valley’s pioneer days of the 1970s.

Do you have a favorite wine movie not on this list? Perhaps wine doesn’t star, but makes a cameo appearance. James Bond’s knowledge of wine helped him trip up his adversaries in “Diamonds are Forever” and “From Russia with Love.” Dennis Quaid played a creditable winemaker in Disney’s “Parent Trap.” Let us know your favorites in the comments.

‘Widow Clicquot’ (2024)

This film (now in theaters) tells the story of Barbe Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the legendary head of the champagne house we know today as Veuve Clicquot. It chronicles how in 1805 when her husband died suddenly, Ponsardin, at age 27, inherited the struggling winery and built it into a powerhouse – and along the way, developing innovations that help define today’s champagne.

“Widow Clicquot” isn’t really about wine. It’s the story of a woman entrepreneur succeeding in a man’s world, combating restrictive laws and rampant misogyny. Her business happens to be wine, and she happens to be really good at it. The movie understands wine and its history – we see how early champagne producers struggled with exploding bottles and how a lost vintage could threaten a struggling business.

We see Barbe Nicole, portrayed with stoic resolve by Haley Bennett, creating the first known vintage-dated champagne and the first known blended rosé champagne. She also is said to have developed the technique of riddling – slowly manipulating and tilting a bottle to move the yeasty sediment to the bottle’s neck, where it can be disgorged. Ponsardin was innovative in marketing, decorating her bottles with a yellow ribbon, a touch that later became the iconic yellow label of Veuve Clicquot champagne. (Veuve means “widow” in French.) She also cultivated an export market in Russia following the lifting of the blockade on importing French goods into the country – no easy feat, considering Napoleon’s war with the country. These accomplishments earned her the sobriquet, “La Grande Dame de la Champagne.”

Throughout the movie, Barbe Nicole’s antagonist is her neighbor, Monsieur Jean-Remy Moët, another familiar name in the history of champagne. A curmudgeon convinced, like most men in the film, that a woman could not and should not be in charge of a winery, he connives to force her to sell him her prime vineyards. Today, of course, Veuve Clicquot is part of the LVMH luxury empire, so the house did eventually come under the Moët umbrella.

‘Sideways’ (2004)

Alexander Payne’s film, starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh in a buddy road trip gone awry, introduced us to Santa Barbara wine country and ignited a national love affair with pinot noir. Gorgeous vineyard scenery, including places we can visit, combined with memorable dialogue to leave a lasting impression. An entire generation can’t say “merlot” without attaching an expletive thanks to this movie, and oenogeeks still swoon to Madsen’s soliloquy on the romantic ephemera of wine.

‘A Good Year’ (2006)

This romcom features Russell Crowe escaping the London rat race to discover himself and wine at a family estate in Provence. (Director Ridley Scott has his own winery, Mas des Infirmières, in southern France.) Crowe tries to discover the secret of his estate’s best wine, a lesson in terroir, and along the way falls in love with Marion Cotillard. It’s a very aspirational film.

‘Any Old Port in a Storm’ (1973)

There’s plenty of debate over whether “Columbo” was a TV series with episodes, or a series of TV movies, or both. Definitions aside, it certainly views like a movie, and this “Columbo” film, part of NBC’s Mystery Movie franchise in the 1970s, was the favorite of the star, Peter Falk, according to IMDb. It features a familiar, if somewhat stereotypical, storyline: Donald Pleasence plays Adrian Carsini, a stuffy, pompous winemaker dedicated to producing world-class wine without regard to cost or profit, who kills his playboy half brother for threatening to sell the winery to the “Marino brothers,” – as in, Ernest and Julio Gallo. Columbo learns about wine to ingratiate himself to Carsini and trick him into incriminating himself. There are a couple of howlers for wine lovers: Carsini is seen leaving his quality-minded boutique winery with a row of enormous fermentation tanks in the background, no doubt filled with the popular cheap wine he despises. And in the final scene, Carsini congratulates Columbo on his choice of “zinFANdle,” mispronouncing the grape. These are small nits to pick in an otherwise supremely enjoyable 90 minutes of TV. And it’s almost certainly the only Columbo film with a reference to Titian.

‘Bottle Shock’ (2008)

This film purports to tell the story of the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting in which California wine triumphed over some of France’s best. Don’t rely on it as a historical account: “Bottle Shock” follows only the winning white wine, Chateau Montelena’s chardonnay, ignoring the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon that triumphed among the reds. Alan Rickman portrays Steven Spurrier, the cheerful wine merchant who organized the tasting, as a skeptical, sneering British snob. He went on to become one of the world’s leading wine writers under he died in 2021. The film captures the frontier spirit of Napa Valley in the mid-1970s, when winemakers were still finding their way, cabernet was not yet king, and the valley was yet to transform into a Disneyesque theme park of wine. The movie’s makers have recently released Bottle Shock: The Wine Game. It combines blind tasting with role-playing and even subterfuge, and could be a fun diversion after watching a movie.