(by Claude Auguste / Editorial team / Photo: 20th Century Fox / animated pic: Runwayml)
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat in the cinema with a cascade of expectations that had nothing to do with wine. A road movie? Two men? Napa Valley? Sounded like summer, sunshine, vines, the good life, right? It also sounded a touch boring. But I absolutely wanted to see the film because Sideways featured a bottle I had always wanted to drink, had not drunk back then and only drank in 2011: the 1961 Cheval Blanc – the cult Merlot from Bordeaux. What Sideways then served up to me was an existence that stirred up dust rather than basking in sunshine – while telling us a surprising amount about wine.
Sideways is an American film by Alexander Payne from 2004, released in Europe in February 2005, starring Paul Giamatti as Miles Raymond and Thomas Haden Church as Jack on a week-long trip through California’s Santa Ynez Valley. What looks like a charming wine tour is in truth a kaleidoscope of midlife anxiety, shattered dreams and two men who never quite believed in themselves, and rarely believed in themselves at all, before losing themselves in the vineyards.
The wine is in Sideways more of a backdrop than a subject – but one that has been perfected almost to the point of absurdity. Miles is a wine freak, taster, overeducated degustateur: he wants every sip to make sense, every wine to be a map, an idea. His escapades – talking about structure, minerality and flavour, his penchant for Pinot Noir and his occasional verbal blows against Californian Merlot – are as comic as they are melancholic.
“If anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am NOT drinking any f***ing Merlot.” – this line appeared, and part of the wine world nodded. Even though it is delivered in just one scene, it became what is known as the Sideways effect: After the US cinema release, Merlot sales fell slightly, while Pinot Noir sales rose sharply. On US soil, Sideways also staged the showdown between Bordeaux and Burgundy.
This was not a scientific-oenological power play, but a cultural echo: Pinot became the star of thought, Merlot the whipping boy of cinematic praise. In bars, restaurants and wine shops, one suddenly sensed that hint of toyboy snobbery which began in a road movie and rose to become a collective wine recommendation.
But Sideways is more than a catalyst for a wine trend. The film demonstrates how the cult of wine often has less to do with grapes or soils and more with projection, constructions of meaning and longing. Here, wine is not tasted, but brought to life. Pinot Noir is not merely flavour; it is a standpoint, a mindset, an attitude – and Merlot becomes the whipping boy because Miles cannot stand himself.
And then, in the cinema finale, this moment: Miles, in his despair, drinks his one cult bottle – the world-famous 1961 Château Cheval Blanc – from a paper cup in a diner. No decadent glass, no candles, no audience. A cult icon torn from its context – and simply just wine.
That is the essence: wine as ritual, wine as fixed point, wine as a constructed way out. Not as a status symbol. Not as a label. But as a contact surface between who we were and who we might become.
Sideways is a road movie about men, wine and failed lives. A film about wine that did not actually want to be about wine. And perhaps that is precisely why it remains so present to this day – along with Merlot bashing, the canonisation of Pinot and the oddly romantic idea that a film can influence demand for an entire grape variety.
What the film lacked at the time – and what stands out even more clearly today – is the absence of women as passionate wine enthusiasts. A curious irony: a film about wine that presents wine appreciation as a male bastion. That may have seemed sentimental 20 years ago – today it seems, well, unavoidably old-fashioned. And that is precisely where its charm lies, as well as its limitation.
Sideways is not an educational film. Not a wine guide. Not a marketing tool. It is a melancholic, comic, eccentric meditation on longing and failure – with wine as one of its finest metaphors.
And it also shows just how dated this perspective, this film, is.