Film featuring Fresno State grad delivers crisp, full-bodied account of the birth of Napa Valley’s wine industry
Courtesy of Montelena.com
Bottle Shock, a movie released in 2008 based on the experience of a Fresno State enology graduate, reflects the value of California’s wine-growing culture and the influence Fresno State had on jump-starting Napa Valley’s wine industry.
Bo Barrett, a Fresno State alumni, helped his father cultivate their vineyard, Chateau Montelena.
In 1976, Jim Barrett’s chardonnay won a blind wine tasting contest in Paris, France, known as the Paris Tasting.
“The Judgment of Paris,” as it came to be known, shattered the myth of invincible French wine and paved the way for winemaking industries in other parts of the world, including California.
“Prior to 1976, it was pretty much a commonly accepted fact that France made the best wines in the world,” Jim Kennedy, Fresno State viticulture and enology department chair, said. “It catapulted California into the upper echelons of the wine-making world.”
Barrett was 18 when his father, Jim Barrett, produced the award-winning 1973 Chardonnay that stunned Parisian wine connoisseurs three years later. “Bottle Shock,” while overdramatized to some degree, accurately portrayed the story Jim and Bo lived.
“If you told me about someone making a movie about me, I would’ve said, ‘Is it going to be five minutes long?’” Barrett said. “I helped on set when they were shooting, but I wasn’t on the creative team.”
The film’s turning point comes when Jim Barrett, after investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Chateau and its wine, finds that all the wine he created is
brown.
Ordering his employees to throw out the wine, he leaves the Chateau before Bo finds that the wine has, in fact, cleared up to create the most spectacular chardonnay he’s ever tasted.
“My first wine-making class at Fresno State, my professor talked about the process, which is called ‘pinking,’” Barrett said. “I told him it happened to me, and he asked me—in front of the class—how we accomplished this feat.”
The process of pinking, where the wine turns from white to pink to white, was prevalent in the 1970s when few wine growers understood the process.
“The wine turning brown in the movie was probably a stretch of Hollywood’s creative license,” Kenneth Fugelsang, a Fresno State viticulture and enology professor, said. “It happened more then, but now we have diagnostic tests that allow us to remove compounds that make it turn pink.”
The viticulture and enology program, which started in 1946 with viticulture in the plant science department and enology in food science, came together under professor Vince Petrucci, but didn’t achieve department status until 2000, nearly a decade after Petrucci retired.
“Vince Petrucci was hired in 1953, but it wasn’t until the ‘90s that there was a lot of push to move the programs together,” Kennedy said.
The Barrett’s 1973 bottle of chardonnay that won the Paris Tasting is now in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C.