and wine shop owner Steven Spurrier, a British expatriate living in Paris, is concerned with how to save his business in his daily conversation with Maurice, a wine lover from Milwaukee who is Spurrier's regular customer. He concocts a plan to hold a blind taste-test intended to introduce Parisians to the quality wines coming from elsewhere in the world. Spurrier travels to the not-yet-famous Napa Valley in search of contestants for his Judgment of Paristaste test, where a chance meeting introduces him to founding vintnerJim Barrett of Chateau Montelena. Barrett wants no part in it, believing it to be a set-up designed by the French to humiliate New World wine producers. Barrett's son, Bo, secretly passes Spurrier a couple of bottles of the Chateau's chardonnay for the competition. Comely and nonconformist university graduate student Sam Fulton arrives at Chateau Montelena seeking an internship, and is promptly put to work while stirring up interest among Bo and vineyard foreman Gustavo. Due to reductionist techniques in wine making, the chardonnay has turned brown in the bottles, causing Barrett Sr. to call for the whole vintage to be carted away for dumping. But Bo discovers the brown color is only temporary and manages to recover the vintage, thanks to the help of local bar owner Joe who had intercepted the bottles on the way to the dump. On the way back to Chateau Montelena, Bo's car runs out of gas, forcing him and Sam to find someone to help them out. After several unsuccessful attempts on Bo's part, Sam takes over and gets a driver to pull over by exposing her breasts. Even though she could get arrested for indecent exposure, the officer agrees to help them out. Bo is asked to travel to Paris to represent the Napa Valley vintners at the contest. After tallying the scores from the eight Parisian judges, Spurrier is shocked to find that Montelena's Chardonnay has won the competition. The report is featured in an article of Time; restaurants and wine shops all around America are asked continuously for the wine and forced to admit that they do not have it. This twist of fate and the resultant oenological epiphany forever changes the fortunes of Napa Valley wineries and the global wine industry as a whole, as it is revealed that French wines are in fact not unbeatable. In the end, the futures of the characters are revealed: Jim Barrett continues to make wine into his 80s, although Bo now runs the winery. A bottle of Montelena Chardonnay 1973 and the red wine, Stags Leapcabernet sauvignon 1973, also from California, that had won the same competition were given a display case at the Smithsonian Institution. In 2006, thirty years after the first competition, Steven Spurrier hosted another contest, this time with full confidence that French wine would win. California won again.
himself has questioned the accuracy of the script while he was involved in another movie project depicting the events of the Judgment of Paris, stating: ""There is hardly a word that is true in the script and many, many pure inventions as far as I am concerned". While the film depicts Gustavo Brambila as being at Chateau Montelena throughout the events leading up to the Judgment of Paris, his 22-year term at Montelena actually began just after the tasting. While at Chateau Montelena, Brambila worked closely with Mike Grgich – who, although not depicted in the film, was the winemaker behind the 1973 Montelena Chardonnay that won in Paris. In the film, the prize-winning chardonnay turns brown for 24 hours after bottling. In real life, the wine turned off-color for a short time after it was bottled, not an uncommon occurrence, and Grgich knew how to handle it.
Critical response
The film received mixed reviews., the film holds a 48% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 124 reviews with an average rating of 5.62 out of 10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Bottle Shock fails to properly utilize the inspiring true tale at its core, settling instead for an ordinary, plodding account."
