Submitted for Your Approval, a Surreal Wine World
When your imagination takes control of your TV, even a winemaker can be a star
Posted: Nov 16, 2011 10:02am ET
I turned the TV on the other
night, just in case there was something on worth watching, and it was the usual
reality show nonsense. But it got me thinking: What would happen if the world
of wine got swept up in our celebrity-crazed mass-media culture?
This season's The
Bachelorette, after all, gave Sonoma
winemaker Benjamin Flajnik his 15 minutes of fame (and he'll get quite a few more next season). Would a show like Iron
Sommelier be all that farfetched? Or
how about America's Next Top Wine List?
And what if we took it to
the extreme and let our imaginations run amok? (Yay amok!) Imagine a network
where wine and reality TV merge and the result is surreality. The lineup of shows might look something like this:
Real Housewives of Pauillac: Baroness Philippine de
Rothschild and Florence Rogers-Pinault create a stir when they throw an
extravagant Bastille Day costume soirée and forget to invite the fifth-growth
gals. Drama ensues.
Dancing with the Sommeliers: If you think they're quick
on their feet in the dining room, wait till you see them bust-a-move on the
dance floor. In the season finale, will Rajat Parr finally master the demanding
pasodoble, or will Daniel Johnnes cha-cha-cha his way to the top prize?
Keeping Up With the Coppolas: Famed movie director Francis
Ford Coppola holds court inside his Napa Valley estate and, amid the usual
family squabbles this week, he contemplates adding a roller coaster to his tourist-destination
Sonoma winery.
Hoarders: Buried in Wine: Every room of Bob's house is
stacked to the ceiling with wine. His wife left him. He lost his job. His dog
ran away. He's down to his last dime. He can't bear to sell his collection and
yet it's too valuable to drink.
Pimp My Winery: Winemaker Derek Domino is
tired of people dissing his winery, a ramshackle redwood barn in Anderson
Valley, so the team pimps it into a palace, complete with open-top marble
fermentors, diamond-studded oak barrels and a 24-carat gold tasting room bar.
Sweet.
Trading Winemakers: Two wine worlds collide when
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti exchanges winemakers with Screaming Eagle. Can the
Burgundian master stand the California heat or will the Californian find
himself out in the cold?
The Real World: Coonawarra: What happens when you put
seven young Australian winemakers (of both sexes) together in the same isolated
house in the Australian wine region of Coonawarra? Crikey, we won't give it
away but it involves a billabong of beer.
Jean-Charles & Gina Plus
8: When two of the world's
biggest wine companies merged with the marriage of Jean-Charles Boisset and
Gina Gallo, little did anyone know that the couple would launch their own
dynasty. But eight kids are a handful even for this multinational
conglomerate.
And don't miss these other
exciting new shows:
Wine Whisperer
So You Think You Can
Sniff, Swirl & Spit?
Last Winemaker Standing
My Big Fat Obnoxious
Trockenbeerenauslese
Outrageous?
Maybe. Silly? Most definitely. But be honest, there's a show in that lineup
you'd really like to watch. What would be your favorite wine reality show?
I would love to see a judging show where a winemaker/producer presents their wine and the judges rate and talk about it. Audience would be tasting simultanteously and could also enter a consensus score.
Also, there would of course be some kind of video/bio of the producer as opposed to some other entertainment.