Wine Documentary Review: A Perfect Vintage
2022
1:34 long
Amazon Prime, FreeVee (ads inserted)
https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Vintage-Timothy-Milos/dp/B09QGQSL7W
I think this documentary was released for free (with ads) streaming on Amazon Prime recently, I don’t recall seeing it before, nor hearing about it. I’d never heard of it before, but Amazon must have observed my tendency to watch wine related videos, even if they were mostly underwhelming, and proffered this up to me as a suggest. Unlike most wine oriented documentaries, where there is usually a contrived protaganist/antagonist plot line (evil weather, malign negociants, lazy pickers, etc.) this Tim Milos hagiography dispenses with such plot pleasantries.
Although I’m not far from UC Davis (and have to take one of my beasts there every month for care by a specialty ag vet) I’m unfamiliar with the nearby Napa ‘scene’. The fancy consultants, vineyards, brands and so on are mostly lost on me. For a wine enthusiast, although more of a Francophile, I have not kept up with a generation of changes. So I have no idea of who all the ‘actors’ were (by that I mean the true life characters in the documentary). Tim Milos and the panoply were just people who looked vaguely like Tim Curry and the cast from Rocky Horror.
I’m not sure why, but the film makes some effort to explain/demonstrate/argue why 2013 in the North Coast (Napa and environs) was a ‘perfect vintage’ as the name of the declares. Normally producers, and their media handmaidens, tend to declare whatever is the current release (and available for sale) as the VOTC. I pulled a 2013 Napa Cab to re-acclimatize - and was very happy, despite the temps - but I’m sure my modest mouse cellar pull would have little in common with the rarefied 100 pt luxury wine that was the film focus.
On that note, although the film was released in 2022, and presumably assembled in recent years prior to that, it ascribes great influence/power/importance to Robert Parker Jr, and his 100 pt scores. I think the main estate wine (a Tim Milos consulting project) profiled in the movie might have earned that elusive/rare mark, but it’s not obvious to me from prices/fame and so on (just a cursory skim on Winesearcher). I wonder if it was some secondary reviewer (writing under the brand of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate) that might have given that mark? In any case, it feels like they were talking about a critic who mattered more 10-15 years prior to the release.
Other random observations: there are a few random French snippets/interviews included, which don’t make any sense with the core storyline. It’s almost like a director said, ‘we paid to film in France, and used up industry capital to get these interviews’ so we have use these 3 minutes somehow, even if they make no sense in the timeline. There’s other elements like that, but they’re harmless, and the documentary goes out of its way to avoid throwing brickbats at any important wine business constituency. It’s a harmless goblet of manufactured white, but I wasn’t dissatisfied/mad or anything.
On my scale, I’d give it a B- or so. Something different than the usual stuff I watch. Hard to believe this is wearing a 8.5 IMDB score, as I think it should be a couple notches lower.