The Sideways Effect

Hi, just a heads up before we begin.

This episode contains adult language.

In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters.

It's about two guys who go on a bachelor's week to wine country.

One of them is a cad who's about to get married.

The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine lover.

We're going to drink a lot of good wine.

We're going to play some golf.

We're going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery.

And we're going to send you off in style, Wolfram.

Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big.

It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations.

It also upended the wine industry.

Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue.

It arrives about a third of the way in as the guys are preparing to meet up with two women.

And if they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.

No, if anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving.

I am not drinking any fucking Merlot.

At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glassful.

And legend has it that after this line, after I'm not drinking any fucking Merlot,

Merlot went ahead and tanked.

It's like I'm Robocop and that's one of my directives now.

No Merlot.

Laura Lippmann is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out.

Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

Yeah, right away.

Right away.

It was like a battle cry.

And I have literally tried to kind of overcome that standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what's for sale.

And

I can't do it.

And I bet I would like Merlot.

I think I did like Merlot.

It's so weird.

It's like

I'm the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

When it comes to Sideways Merlot and wine in general, she's not the only one.

I'm Willa Paskin, and this is Decodering.

In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has has a name, the Sideways Effect.

In this episode, we're going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is.

Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades?

Did a monologue jump-start demand for a whole other varietal?

Did Paul Giamatti's sad-sack character change our relationship to yet another wine?

One that was barely mentioned in the film?

Today, I'm decodering all of these questions, and this one: is it long long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

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The Sideways effect is not just one thing.

There are a number of components to it.

But I'm going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales.

When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America.

But America had not always had a trendiest wine.

The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid-20th century.

California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines.

And then in the early 90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French paradox.

The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods, but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans.

The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

So, the answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass.

Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

Merlot was a good candidate because a couple things.

Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

This is is not actually too simplifying to say.

It's an easy word to pronounce.

The other part is that it's fairly fruit forward and the cannons aren't very strong and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it's made in California.

So it's like a very soft, easy drinking kind of red wine.

Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape.

But the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s.

Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils.

But that doesn't mean it should be grown everywhere.

Grapes are a funny fruit because the more a grapevine has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

California's cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California's breadbasket, the hot, fertile central valley.

That's like where Driscoll's strawberries come from.

So if Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you're going to have really bad grapes.

And that's where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot.

And even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, a kind of inoffensive, fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in francia boxes.

All of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

It was uncool to drink Merlot.

In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

I'll try to be brief.

You know, my life was shit and I'd made some films and, you know, part of company with my ex-wife, whatever.

And I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store.

There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever.

You know, it was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine Philistine or an idiot.

Rex regularly went up to the Santa Santa Inez Valley just north of Los Angeles.

As wine country goes, it's nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north closer to San Francisco.

This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

There's just nobody up there and I'd go up midweek.

I was broke and I'd go play golf for 25 hours on a great course.

I'd go wine tasting.

It was free.

Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways.

The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex.

He was also a frustrated divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot of a 1990s on a file.

When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and Avautschmitt.

I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles.

You know, and when I'm reading something that I think could be a movie, I'm just praying, oh, please stay good till the end.

Like don't come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something.

Like keep it a good, sad, funny human story.

When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie.

Payne is also into wine.

And when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was.

And then I think people who didn't know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way.

So it had this kind of snowball effect.

It was a good snowballing joke.

And it seemed to roll right over Merlot's reputation.

What do you guys make?

We've been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I've been around.

Jeff Bunchu is the sixth generation owner of Gunlock Bunchu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

A good Merlot is pretty sexy.

I mean, voluptuous, like round and intense without like the sort of mouth-puckering tannins or like austerity of an ageable Cabernet.

Jeff agrees that in the 1990s, a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn't very good.

When Sywiz called this out, his Merlot, high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

You'd have thought like Spider-Man himself had like swung in and like tossed out Merlot.

Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot's troubles.

Katie Kurek, while hosting the Today Show, said she heard she wasn't supposed to drink it anymore.

People started coming into Jeff's tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot.

And pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote.

Steve Quear, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

It was literally just repeated over and over and over, you know, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day.

So I just figured, okay, let's try to measure it.

What is the effect?

In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect, a test for changes in the demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir wines.

It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

The movie was released in October 22,

2004.

And prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate.

After that, sales really just collapsed.

If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost zero afterwards.

Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking.

And it's the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

When I first saw this, I'm like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect.

At least I'll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

But first, he wanted to check Merlot's sales against a control to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

So we figured, let's choose something that isn't mentioned in the movie.

Let's just avoid the red wine and we'll choose Chardonnay.

It's got large sales.

It should be equivalent to Merlot.

In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wines.

Exactly.

It is kind of the big seller.

As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger.

It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America.

But when Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising.

He pulled up the graph for me.

When you do that,

it looks the same.

The graph of Chardonnay's sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot's.

A steep mountain that just abruptly tables off.

After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay's sales had flatlined too.

Which is just bizarre.

And this is really the gist of the paper.

Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn't the result of the movie Sideways because Chardonnay, which wasn't featured anywhere in the movie good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too.

But in the decade plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don't.

There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off.

It's low quality, catching up with it.

Nothing can stay trendy forever.

But there was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except sideways.

But what does sideways have to do with Chardonnay?

So that's not a rhetorical question.

I think there's an answer to it.

But before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the sideways effect.

So let's put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti's Miles actually likes.

Pinot is a very thin skin grape.

It doesn't like constant heat or humidity.

Very delicate.

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So if the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir.

Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown.

Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different.

And this distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir and you explore Pinot Noir.

You know, it's very, you know, sensual and it's exciting and it's delicious.

Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Inez Valley.

She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

So probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand.

a certain environment for it to excel.

You know, it needs a cool climate.

It needs good drainage.

It needs a place that isn't too rich.

And what happens is that it's all expensive.

All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass.

And then along came Sideways.

See, Pinot Noir is Miles' favorite wine.

He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it's clear he's not just describing a grape.

he's also describing himself.

Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.

And

then, I mean,

oh, its flavors are just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and

ancient on the planet.

Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

Absolutely, yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest of Pinot Noir.

A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out.

Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot's overnight popularity and there was a mad dash to plant more of it.

In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since.

But there was a lag at first because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit.

And there were other difficulties too.

Starting with the price.

Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

And I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it's $12 a glass.

And I thought, that's insane.

I mean, we have Bud Light for $250.

Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

Pinot, grown correctly, is expensive.

It just takes a lot of care.

But after the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot.

And so you start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot.

Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn't be and attended to less carefully.

And that means less quality product makes it into bottles.

Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley.

The sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn't even good for adaptable Merlot.

So then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

But even good Pinot Noir didn't necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for.

Like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell's Sports Bar.

They returned it.

They said, oh, this is watery.

I don't like this at all.

And I took it back.

I didn't know anything about wine at the time.

But the flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting.

They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it's exact opposite.

Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn't taste like a Pinot.

Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around because remember, growers hadn't been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking.

Some of the very best French wines are blends.

But in America, the standards are a bit looser.

You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that's named on the label.

All of that extra Syrah.

It made the Pinot go down easier.

They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because a real unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted.

So it even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

I'm not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad, or all tasted like Syrah.

And in the long term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction.

But in the short term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success.

And while this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is

it made for better Merlot.

What it did mean there for a minute,

there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

Jeff Bunsheu, the Merlot maker at Gunlock Bunshew again.

So the red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways that became red blends because no one would buy a Merlot were way effing better.

So as you may have suspected, I know very little about wine.

I've learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off.

And when someone asks me what I think about one, I often don't know.

I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate.

I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know.

And I know this isn't a universal feeling, but I don't think it's uncommon.

Like you could ask somebody, you like that movie?

Do you like that peanut butter?

Do you like that toothpaste?

And they're going to say, I hate that movie.

I love that peanut butter.

I'm down with that toothpaste.

You ask them about a wine and they're like, I'm like, so sorry that I'm not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn't taste very good to me.

Wine is just uniquely intimidating.

And I think that's at least as important to the sideways effect as whatever was in the script.

It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact.

People want guidance about wine.

And we'll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a somalier, a wine critic, or a movie character.

Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life.

He's miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable.

I mean, listen to him.

Don't be shy.

Really get your nose right in there, really.

Little citrus.

Oh, there's just like the faintest sousa of of like asparagus and there's a just a flutter of like a like a nutty Edom cheese.

He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer and yet he influenced the heck out of us even though we weren't using that word then.

His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority.

His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating underestimating him, the movie he's in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine.

Maybe it's all bigger.

Maybe it's even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

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So we're gonna get back to that Merlot-Chardonnet mystery I pinned back there.

You'll remember the economist Steve Koyar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay's sales plateaued in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample right after Sideways came out in 2004.

No one had really been able to make sense of this, but then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars.

Should I tell you what The Economist said?

Yes, I'm very interested.

Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s, there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants.

And those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

And the reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made.

So Chardonnay was a little bit sweet.

Merlot could be a little bit sweet.

They were just

like almost a transition one.

They were easy.

And people didn't order white wine anymore by the glass.

They ordered Chardonnay.

Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it.

It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn't really know much about wine.

People who knew wine would start saying, well i'm abc anything but chardonnay rex pickett had noted it too the waiter would say red or white you know and if he if he said white it was going to be some really cheap probably chardonnay and and if it was red it was going to be merlot

so here are these twinned wines and then sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other I thought you hated Chardonnay.

No, no, no.

I like all varietals.

I just don't generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California too much.

Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot.

Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine and they backed away from it.

If that feels a little over-determined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting.

But it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there.

Walking out of the movie, you could think, I've got to stay away from Merlot.

I've got to drink Pinot Noir.

But you could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Quayar's graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back.

But the wine market didn't collapse.

We just started drinking something else.

This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it.

They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them.

Jeff Bunchew again.

I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can't believe I know him by first name basis,

was like, was like, this Merlot sucks.

I mean, he sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of like standing up for saying like, I don't care.

This isn't very good.

Do you really think it's that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, we trust Miles?

I see it more as permission, but I guess that's because I'm an optimist and I don't think everybody is like total sheep.

Like a permission to hate wine that they don't like.

Kathy Joseph used the exact same word while being similarly optimistic.

You know, the movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Inez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine lists diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay.

It all amounts to a third theory of the sideways effect: that sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out.

And as it turns out, there's a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general.

It isn't from Miles, it's from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes.

And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now?

I like how wine continues to evolve.

Like if I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day.

Because a bottle of wine is actually alive.

And it's...

constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Maya isn't relaying rules about wine.

She's praising it for always changing.

There's a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it.

It's why they make a good romantic pairing.

And it tastes so fucking good.

Miles' rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance.

Two ways of appreciating wine and life.

Steve Quear's paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following sideways.

Chardonnay sales bounced back.

It's still the most popular wine in America.

Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it's now often used in America as it's used in France as a blending grape.

And the overall percentage of it compared to all the grapes crushed in the country has fallen.

A few years in, our Merlot sales were down, and I'm like, dad, we got to get out of Merlot.

We got to plant something else.

And he's like, oh, it's going to come back.

Yeah, but always comes back.

And for like a decade, two decades, like, when's it coming back?

When's it coming back?

This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story.

That Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot's reputation, doesn't even hate it.

So what gems do you have in your collection?

Oh.

So about halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he's been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

I've got things I'm saving, definitely.

I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

You've got a 61 Cheval Blanc and it's just sitting there?

Yes, I do.

Go get it.

I'm serious.

Hurry.

A 61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700.

He tells Maya he'd been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

You know, the day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that's the special occasion.

In In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine.

He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a styrofoam cup.

As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, hmm.

Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

And this shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of

Merlot.

Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly, and you can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite.

But the meaning seems plainer to me.

Miles really loves wine.

He really knows wine.

He doesn't hate Merlot, one of wine's essential noble grapes.

He just hates the bad version of it.

And this love-hate thing is right at the heart of of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects.

It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us.

People who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things.

We're sheeple and we don't want to be told what to do.

We're easily led and we're curious.

We're Miles and we're Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippmann who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine.

The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she'd just gone to the wine store.

There was something going on where I was like, you know, I should get a really good bottle of red wine.

And I was like, what if, what if I bought Merlot?

She did it.

She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

And I thought it was terrific, actually.

And I was like, I will do this again.

I will drink Merlot again.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Dakota Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin.

This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissman, Peter Work, Loewen Liu, Josh Levine, and Travis Libert.

The 2021 paper Travis co-authored, called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the sideways effect and we'll link to it on our showpage.

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