Wine as Represented in Contemporary Cinema

Celebrated gastronomic films like Babette’s Feast (1987), Big Night (1996) or Ratatouille (2007) and many others pose the problem of otherness by calling their characters, as holders of heterodox culinary/cultural identities, to seek integration to the social environment. Many films dedicated to wine take a different path. For some time now, along with the progressive saturation of every possible narrative grip within so-called gastromania, wine has acquired a certain visibility as an autonomous cinematographic subject, inspiring films entirely dedicated to it. This is the case of some emblematic titles: Sideways (2004), a progenitor of the genre, and other titles such as Saint Amour (2016), Return to Burgundy (2017), The Chateau Meroux (2011), Days of Harvest (2010), A Good Year (2006), up to the Rohmerian A Tale of Autumn (1998). These films are configured as great narratives of return (nostos), whose heroes are called by fate (the death of a relative, for example) to retrace their life path, backwards, reuniting, through wine, with their own deepest identity. While a clear trend in culinary movies insists on the spatial problem of the coexistence of characters who cook and eat in different ways, many films dedicated to wine pose the problem in temporal terms, calling the protagonists of their stories to come to terms with an inheritance received from the past (what to do with a château or an inherited vineyard in the French countryside?). Thus, multiple political forms are constituted, aiming towards the dissolution of the conflict between the past and the present, making it possible to reconcile this conflict and to relaunch it towards the future. Following this macro-movement backwards, my paper intends to investigate the political forms that involve the terroir and the vineyard by taking into consideration both the side of production and that of wine consumption (with a specific interest towards food and wine tourism) as they are represented in some emblematic movies: A Tale of Autumn (1998), Sideways (2004), Mondovino (2004), A Good Year (2006), Natural Resistance (2014), Saint Amour (2016), and The Last Prosecco (2017). These films will be taken into consideration for their aptitude to complement one another within a systematic set and as instances of a wider trend that is obviously not exhaustive of all the virtualities that wine may open up in stories. The terroir, in these representations, tends to fade as an ineffable, multi-sensorial and stratified semiotic machine, of which wine, although commonly understood as its main emanation, ends up representing only one of the areas of emergence and perhaps not even the most important one. That is why, in order to experience the “true meaning” of their wine, the heroes of these films can only move to the vineyard, experimenting with its daily customs and practices, for a while... or for a lifetime.