Hollywood and Vine
From James Bond to Hannibal Lector, Hollywood's most memorable characters have always had a little help from the bottle
Although this year's Oscar-nominated movies have many merits, oenophiles are bitter that the only good wine scene among them is in Catch Me if You Can. Leonardo DiCaprio's parents unwittingly spill wine on the carpet as they're dancing, then grind the stain in with their feet—a harbinger of darker days to come. (Wine lovers in the audience whispered: "Use salt." "No, white wine will do it." Meanwhile, the beer drinkers were able to follow the plot.)
Like some of Hollywood's most versatile actors, wine has long been cast in both good and bad guy roles: either it is a mark of sophistication or of evil. Rarely, is it neutral in the way beer is. Perhaps that's because we view wine as a drink loaded with our own insecurities. For example, appreciating wine is often part of both coming-of-age films and make-over movies. In My Fair Lady (1964), Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle how to taste wine. In a modern twist on the same theme, Michael Caine plays an aristocratic snob hired to teach the tomboy undercover cop Sandra Bullock how to act like a lady in Miss Congeniality (2002). In a restaurant, he sips on his red wine while she chugs her beer. Caine says to the sommelier, "Gaston, I'll have another cabernet sauvignon." He looks at Bullock and asks, "And another keg for you?"
When the streetwise CIA agent Chris Rock must pass himself off as an art dealer in Bad Company (2002), he's taught how to appreciate bordeaux and port. But mostly it's women who are on the receiving end of instruction: In the 1958 musical Gigi, for instance, Lesley Caron must learn to drink wine as part of her training as a courtesan.
The most memorable song in that film (after Thank Heaven for Little Girls, of course) is The Night They Invented Champagne. More than any other type of wine, champagne represents refinement, luxury, love and celebration. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman drink champagne in Casablanca (1942) to forget the imminent war. Sam plays As Time Goes By, and Bogie says to Bergman, "Henri [the proprietor] wants us to finish this bottle, and then three more. He says he'll water his garden with champagne before he'll let the Germans drink it." He offers his classic toast, "Here's looking at you, kid." But when they kiss, the camera pans down to reveal that Bergman has tipped over her champagne glass—symbolizing the end of her happy times with Bogart.
Of course, James Bond was one of the first action heroes to make wine connoisseurship seem masculine and sexy. (Most of he-man flicks don't lend themselves to the quiet reflection of wine: try to imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger sipping a silky burgundy to relax after an extended car chase.) In Bond's most recent flick, Die Another Day, 007 is freed after fourteen months of torture in a North Korean prison. The first thing he wants? A shave and a bottle of 1961 Bollinger. In GoldenEye (1995), a female psychiatrist asks him what he does to relax. Bond presses a button on the dashboard of his Aston Martin, revealing a refrigerated compartment with a bottle of 1988 Bollinger Grande Année and two flute glasses.
Even in combat, Bond can't resist showing off his connoisseurship: Using a bottle as a weapon in Dr. No (1962), 007 pauses when the villain points out: "It's a Dom Perignon '55. It would be a pity to break it." Bond snaps back, "I prefer the '53 myself," and gives him a good thump on the head. In Goldfinger (1964), in bed with his latest amour, Bond reaches over to feel a bottle of 1953 Dom Perignon, and observes, "Oh, it's lost its chill." (Sometimes, a bottle is not just a bottle.) He explains, "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs." Bending over to put the champagne in the fridge to chill, he doesn't see the killer.
Alas, that's not the only time when wine etiquette distracts Bond from spycraft. In From Russia with Love (1963), an assassin posing as a fellow agent joins 007 for dinner in the luxury dining car of the Orient Express. With their grilled sole, Bond orders a blanc de blancs Taittinger champagne—but the impostor asks for a chianti, "the red kind." Later, when 007 recovers from being knocked unconscious by the bad guy, he observes bitterly, "Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something." But the villain responds, "You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees." (Of course, Bond would have a much tougher time ferreting out the bad guys today, since the old rules about red wine and fish have long since been broken.)
However, in Diamonds are Forever (1971), Bond uses his knowledge of red wine to ferret out the bad guy. As Bond and Jill St. John are sharing a private dinner aboard a cruise liner, the sommelier pours the 1955 Mouton-Rothschild. Bond casually remarks that it's a pity the ship doesn't have any claret. The wine steward agrees, confirming Bond's suspicion that the sommelier is an impostor—since Mouton is, in fact, a claret. The villain tries to strangle Bond with his tastevin, but Bond throws both him and his "bombe surprise" dessert overboard.
Many films use the sophistication and pretension of wine as humour. In Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Meg Ryan's boyfriend tries to impress her in a restaurant by ordering a bottle of Dom DeLuise. In Batman Forever (1995), the beautiful Dr. Chase Meridian says to Batman, "I'll bring the wine, you bring your scarred psyche." And in The Jerk (1979), the nouveau riche Steve Martin takes his fiancée to a fancy French restaurant. In his opinion, it's a disaster: First there are snails on the plates, and then they're served old wine. Martin insists on a bottle of their freshest-and reminds the waiter not to forget to put umbrellas in the glasses this time.
Martin's the man, after all, who once ordered a "beige wine"—not red, not white, just middle of the road in a Saturday Night Live skit. And in The Muppet Movie (1979), playing the sommelier to Kermit and Miss Piggy, he brings them a sparkling muscatel (one of the finest from Idaho) and asks if Kermit would like to "sniff the bottle cap." After pouring, he produces two straws for their glasses.
Although not written as a comedy, a Walk In The Clouds (1995) offered many laughs for wine lovers and winemakers alike. Keenu Reeves, a travelling salesman, meets Aitana, the beautiful daughter of a California vineyard owner. She's distraught at her unplanned pregnancy, and he agrees to pose as her husband for her domineering father. But they only fall in love through the transformative sensuality of the grape harvest rituals: bare flesh pressing squishy grapes, wet purple peasant dresses hugging lithe virginal hips—it's more sensuous than Jell-O wrestling, and second only to the scene in Spartacus (1960) when Tony Curtis Lawrence washes Olivier's back with a 1947 Château Margaux.
For viticulturists, though, the first howler is when everyone dons homemade butterfly wings and runs through the vineyards flapping their arms—this is supposed to keep the frost from killing the vines. The second knee-slapper is towards the end, when a dissolute brother throws a gas lantern at one of the vines—and the ripe green grapes explode into flames like Molotov cocktails, causing the entire vineyard to burn like dead leaves. (To achieve this effect, one vintner said they'd have had to fly a pesticide plane over the vineyards and douse them with diesel fuel.) But of course that's not the point: the fire gave our dreamboat a chance to pitch in heroically, put the fire out, and finally be accepted into the family.
The next day, amid the smoldering vineyard, he and Aitana find one live vine conveniently left on a picturesque hill top. He effortlessly uproots the gnarly old growth with his bare hands (though the task usually requires John Deere equipment) and hands it to the patriarch. They decide to clone the vine to start a new vineyard, and a new life— presumably one filled with genetic engineering and lobbying over organic labelling.
Looks alone have made red wine the preferred drink of horror movies, often an omen of evil. The Dracula movies associate wine with blood. "Aren't you drinking?" inquires the guest, as Count Dracula pours him a glass of claret. "I never drink ... wine," the Count replies. In Interview With The Vampire (1994), Tom Cruise wrings out the blood of a rat into a crystal wine glass for Brad Pitt, who's feeling squeamish about human blood.
Silence of the Lambs is in the same queasy vein. After it hit the theatres in 1991, many wine lovers (and most census takers) eased up on the chianti after watching Hannibal Lecter pair the Tuscan wine with fava beans and human liver. (Oenophiles sniffed that, in the novel, the wine was a more classic Amarone della Valpolicella.) A decade later in the sequel Hannibal, Lecter's connoisseurship rises to a new level: he selects a 1996 Château Phélan-Ségur. And while his decision to pair such a robust red with pan-fried human frontal lobes cannot be faulted, that he also chooses to serve it with caviar is simply barbaric.
Wine has also made hundreds of appearances in Hollywood thrillers. In Disclosure (1994) Demi Moore uses wine to instigate some nefarious action of her own. In her executive penthouse office late one night, Moore tries to seduce her new manager, a married man, played by Michael Douglas. She tells him to pour each of them a glass of wine. Picking up the bottle, a rare Californian cult cabernet, Douglas asks, "Pahlmeyer'91—how did you know I've been looking for that?" "Well," she says, "I want all the boys under me to be happy."
Of course, those were the sun-dappled days of innocence, before wineries and other consumer products began paying tens of thousands of dollars for such a mention. Word has that Disclosure's production manager phoned Jayson Pahlmeyer and asked for a free case of his wine to use in the movie. Pahlmeyer told him that it cost $25 a bottle and hung up. But then Pahlmeyer recalled that the bottle of champagne that Tom Cruise drank in Top Gun had garnered Taittinger $150,000 in free publicity. So he called the production manager back. When Disclosure was finally released, Pahlmeyer's phone rang constantly, for weeks; and it rang some more after the European release and the television rerun. Had he made four times the amount of wine actually produced, he could have sold it all.
When the Academy Awards air this year, wine lovers will no doubt be watching with a good glass of wine in hand, reminding them of the irritating way that many actors' hold their wine glass—by the bowl rather than the stem, thereby warming the wine and leaving unsightly fingerprints. Directors consult all sorts of experts, from set designers to makeup artists; so isn't it time that they included an oenophile on the team? If nothing else, she could choose the wine when the cast dines out at those chi-chi Hollywood restaurants. Martin Scorcese are you listening?
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April 2003
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Chef2Chef News Desk