Released today on DVD is Randall Miller’s smart, delightful comedy Bottle Shock The Note video Fatal Attraction dvd , which tells the story of a 1976 wine-tasting contest that changed the oenophile world forever, by demonstrating that America could create wines good enough to compete with the best France has to offer. The contest actually happened, but it would have been necessary to invent it in any case, to give Alan Rickman a perfect vehicle: he plays British ex-pat London wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who conceives of the contest sure the outcome will favor Old Europe and is as amazed as everybody else by the outcome. Rickman proves again that he is this generation’s George Sanders – he’s companionably pompous, effortlessly elegant, and he finds layers to even the simplest roles (he’s long overdue for a truly great movie – and while we wait for that, he’d be great as Jeeves opposite somebody young like Ben Wishaw as Bertie Wooster).

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He’s got some excellent company in Bottle Shock, which boasts a generally fine cast and uniformly, um, juicy writing by Judy Savin. It’s true that calling Bill Pullman’s performance as Napa Valley farmer Jim Barrett ‘wooden’ would be an insult to all the bottle-corks in the movie, but everyone else is first-rate: Dennis Farina reminds viewers that he has always played creeps better than tough guys; Boston’s own Eliza Dushku takes the movie’s weakest part and makes something of it; and we mustn’t forget that this is the very last role in which charismatic young Chris Pine will be an unknown – in only a few months, he catapults to A-list part-picking mega-fame as the new incarnation of Captain James T. Kirk. Bottle Shock bodes well for Star Trek: Pine very nearly steals the movie even from Rickman.

Comparisons with the grotesquely overrated Sideways are inevitable here (you can almost feel the movie bracing for them), but don’t let them dismay you: in Bottle Shock there’s far less pointless cynicism, far more genuine heart, and far more comic effectiveness. The main things the two movies have in common are sharp writing and the presence of a genuine acting genius (the great Paul Giamatti, of course, in Sideways

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) – and wine, that perpetual helpmeet to mankind. By all means uncork a bottle while you enjoy Bottle Shock – I heartily recommend it.

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