Films about Wine

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

As wine has become more deeply embedded in popular culture, not least in the US, so films about wine proliferated in the 21st century, but wine features strongly in at least three in the 20th century. Perhaps the earliest of the modern era was Hitchcock’s Notorious, a 1946 spy thriller whose plot turns on the whereabouts of the key to a wine cellar. Food was perhaps more important than wine in the 1987 classic Babette’s Feast but her one sumptuous blow-out meal served to her austere Danish employers included sherry, 1860 veuve clicquot champagne, an 1846 clos de vougeot, and a cognac. There is no doubt about wine’s role in the 1996 thriller Blood and Wine which stars Jack Nicholson as a Florida wine merchant who turns to crime. The 1998 remake of The Parent Trap set male parent Denis Quaid on a Napa Valley wine estate.