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In Sideways, a rollicking road movie on the wine trail, audiences may see Paul Giamatti's sad sack, Miles, as a wine geek desperately in need of a life. His wine-clueless buddy puts it more crudely.
True geeks, however, know Miles is quite a romantic: He is hopelessly in love with pinot noir.
Pinot was a fickle grape in its native Burgundy and more so in California; getting grapes right in the vineyard and wine right in tanks is not easy. To love it can be frustrating, but when reality matches the dream, pinot makes a delicious red, sleeker and lighter than cabernet, both fruity and earthy.
When the writerly Miles explains the appeal of pinot, its vulnerability, clumsiness, need for patience and hidden elegance, we know it represents his own experiences with his failed loves.
Even if they wouldn't cast Giamatti as pinot, wine lovers will find the wine superbly cast in Sideways. Moviegoers with no knowledge of wine will get an exhilarating taste of true wine lore and love that goes beyond laughable pomposity to a raunchily happy lust for life.
One reason is that with pinot as the star, only a few U.S. locations will do. One of the best is the Santa Barbara Valley outside Los Angeles - not the hippie coast, but its farmland. It's part Burgundy for its fine wine and part Australia for its lusty good humor, more diverse and dusty than snooty Napa.
Santa Barbara hasn't forgotten that it was cattle country not so long ago. So the wine lovers here aren't magazine-worthy beautiful, they're regular people who live in houses as messy as their sex lives. (Set dressers had too much fun at this, but they did stash prize bottles among the junk.) The actors occasionally slip into laughable jargon and pretentions. "If anyone orders merlot, I'm leaving," Miles insists, only to find out the women he and his pal hit on are just as savvy. Along the way, they curse a blue streak, laugh, drink too much and even smoke; this is not Andrea Immer's wine country.
Yet they enjoy good wine. The pinots they drink are great choices around Santa Barbara: Foxen, Sanford, Byron, Sea Smoke and Andrew Murray. A bottle of Au Bon Climat peeks out at one point, the Bien Nacido vineyard gets a tout, and Fess Parker's winery graciously stands in as Frass Canyon, a fictitious winery of dubious merit.
Viewers also get painless lessons in tasting and picking, and even an example of the area's famous fog.
That's all thanks to the wine love and knowledge of director Alexander Payne. Pinot noir, Santa Barbara and the joy of wine could not get better product placement if they paid for it.