Corked is a mockumentary based in Sonoma County, California. It follows the lives of several winemakers of different backgrounds: the large corporate winery, the established winery with new ownership, the one-man winery, and the marketing duo based in San Francisco. All are trying to make the best wine possible in order to win Sonoma County’s “Golden Harvest Award” and each run into their own specific problems on the road to wine greatness.
The film’s terroir is primarily Sonoma County, although the viewer is able to see different aspects of vineyards in the county, and also exposure to the difficulties in growing there. One of the vineyard managers creates a giant sound system to scare wildlife away with a jaguar call, and openly complains about people from the nearby casino having relations in his vineyard – an absurd scene, but it does highlight some of the issues a winery in California can face. I also wouldn’t be surprised, with California’s history of innovation, if the loud speaker technique hasn’t been attempted at some point.
I liked that the movie focused pretty closely on certain aspects of the winemaking process that may not get attention in other movies. One example was the display of picking the grapes for the harvest. The other wine films I have watched glossed over the physical picking of the grapes.
Corked specifically focused on the aspect by introducing the Iowa tourist couple who wanted to experience true wine country. Expecting the Disney World version of wine, they agreed to join the migrant workers for a day to help pick grapes. It was pretty predictable that they left halfway through the day’s picking because they were hot and sweaty, but I liked that the scene did show how difficult the work of harvesting grapes was, and how fast the migrant workers could pick.
Another aspect that was spoofed was the spraying of sulfites on the grapes. In the other movies I have seen, and even the books I have read, the topic of sulfites has not really come up. In this movie, it became front and center when the young hotshot owner and his beau got caught in the fields while the sulfites were being sprayed.
I liked how disparate the different winemakers were from each other, and how the movie was then able to spoof many different aspects of wine culture. The corporate winery probably got the best knocks, between the stiff winery manager who liked cats and the covering up of a body found in one of the wine vats. The marketing duo showed how little someone could know about wine and still attempt to make money off of it – “Shizzle Creek” was an attempt to sell wine to inner city African Americans. The two other wineries showed more of the real-life aspects of working the vineyards in California. One had a redneck in charge of the grapes, most often seen drinking a beer, even in the middle of the wine award ceremony. The other had one man in charge of everything, from growing to winemaking to bottling. I think this character captured the passion that some people have for wine; truly, their entire lives are dedicated to the life cycle of grapes and wine. His wife was seen angrily leaving come harvest time, and he proclaimed at the end of the movie that he might need to actually hire an employee.
Wine knowledge from class helped me to understand some of the jokes. The character of Richard Parsons, the snobby wine critic with strict tasting rules, was pretty funny. But knowing that the character was likely based on real life critic Robert Parker made the satire really hit home. The scene of Parsons almost literally being mauled outside his hotel room so that he would get a taste of a wine shows how much influence the wine critic can have on the success or failure of a winery. Other wine facts from class helped in the scenes with the wine marketers – much of what they said was completely incorrect, but if I didn’t have the wine background I may not have realized the stupidity of their statements. I specifically liked how they focused on the label that would adorn the bottles more than the actual contents of the wine – they didn’t question why a valued winery would give away a selection of grapes for next to nothing.
I would definitely recommend
Corked to a wine audience. The movie was just downright funny and it highlighted the best and worst parts of wine culture. Unlike
Bottle Shock, the movie was obvious in its spoofing of California wine, and its humor was much closer in line with my own. I think the reason I liked
Corked so much is that most of the hilarity didn’t seem too far off from the reality of Sonoma County wineries.
