This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
Sideways is not the kind of movie that’s supposed to be a hit. Released in October 2004, it’s about two buddies on a bachelor’s weekend in wine country. The one who’s about to get married, Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, is a cad desperate to enjoy his last days of freedom. The other, Paul Giamatti’s Miles, is a divorcé pedantically obsessed with wine. Over the course of the weekend, they drink, Jack chases women, they drink, Jack tries to get Miles to chase women, they drink, they bicker, they drink, they bicker, they grow. It’s contained and mellow, but upon its release, it grossed $110 million around the world, earned five Oscar nominations—and, most notoriously, upended the wine industry.
All it took was one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way into the film, as the guys are preparing to meet up with two women.
“If they want to drink merlot, we’re drinking merlot,” Jack warns his friend.
“No, if anybody orders merlot, I’m leaving,” Miles responds. “I am not drinking any fucking merlot!”
At the time this line was first uttered, people were chugging merlot down by the glassful. Legend has it that after “I am 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,” crime novelist Laura Lippman told me. Lippman saw Sideways when it first came out, and it put her off merlot right away. Decades later, she would still find herself standing in her neighborhood liquor store, looking at a merlot on sale, unable to pull the trigger.
“I bet I would like merlot. I think I did like merlot,” she said. “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. The movie’s impact on the wine industry actually has a name: “the Sideways Effect.” But decades after the movie got released, there are still a number of unanswered questions about what that effect actually was.
Did a line in a movie really depress merlot sales for years? 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? And is it long past time to start drinking some fucking merlot?
This story was adapted from an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring. It was written by Willa Paskin, who produced it with Elizabeth Nakano. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa, Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Subscribe to the show.
There are a number of components to the Sideways Effect, but I’m going to begin with the best-known part of the phenomenon: the theory that Sideways shanked merlot sales.
At the time Sideways arrived in theaters, merlot was the trendiest red wine in America. America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to all wine well into the 20th century.
But then California whites caught on in the 1970s, after one won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. (It’s such an underdog story they basically made it into a sports movie.) 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 why. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox,” correspondent Morley Safer said, a bottle of red beside him, “may lie in this inviting glass.”
Sales of red wine spiked—and none benefited more than merlot, which by the end of the decade was the most popular red wine in the country.
Tim Farrell, a wine buyer for the store Brooklyn Wine Exchange, told me that merlot was “a good candidate” for that position because “it’s an easy word to pronounce” and it’s “a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.” Farrell said that merlot is “fairly fruit forward, and the tannins aren’t very strong. And the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California.”
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. “The more a grape vine has to struggle to ripen,” Farrell told me, “the more flavorful the fruit is.”
California’s cool, coastal areas are good for merlot, but during the ’90s boom, merlot also started being planted in California’s breadbasket: the hot, fertile Central Valley. Those conditions allowed merlot to grow too easily. The mediocre grapes that resulted led to a lot of thin, too-sweet merlot. 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 Franzia boxes.
All of which made merlot something of a joke to wine people. “It was uncool to drink merlot,” Rex Pickett said.
In the 1990s, Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica. “My life was shit, and I made some films and, you know, parted company with my ex-wife or whatever, and I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store,” he said. In the community of “doctors and lawyers and snobs” that gathered there, “it was just generally conceded that if you liked merlot, you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.”
Pickett was spending time in the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As wine country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, both of 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 was nobody up there, and I’d go up midweek,” he told me. “I was broke, and I’d go play golf for $25 at a great course.” He’d also go wine tasting, for free.
Pickett poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Pickett. He was a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was pinot noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for merlot of a 1990s oenophile.
Pickett’s book got rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt. Payne told me that he read the book on a flight from London to L.A. “When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie,” he said, “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. 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 as he co-wrote the screenplay, he understood that the “No fucking merlot” line was a good one.
“People who knew about wine knew how much crappy merlot there was,” he said. “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.
“A good merlot is pretty sexy,” Jeff Bundschu told me. “I mean, voluptuous—round and intense, without the sort of mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.”
Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, merlot. He agrees that in the ’90s a lot of merlot just wasn’t very good. After Sideways called this out, his merlot—the high-quality stuff—got caught up in it. “You’d have thought, like, Spider-Man himself had swung in and, like, tossed out merlot.”
Scores of newspapers chronicled merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting the Today show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Bundschu’s tasting room and stating that they just did not drink merlot. And pretty much every winemaker and -seller has similar anecdotes.
Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them. “It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day,” he said. “So I just figured, OK, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?”
In 2009, Cuellar 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 researchers found that before Sideways’ October 2004 theatrical release, “merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed.” In terms of percentage growth rate, merlot went from 13 percent to “almost zero.”
Cuellar showed me a line graph as we were talking. It’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out. When he saw that, he was certain that the effect he was seeing was real and huge. But first he wanted to check merlot’s sales against a control—to look at another wine to see what had happened to its sales during the same time period. For that control, he chose a white wine, one that doesn’t play a major part in Sideways: chardonnay.
As big as merlot was, chardonnay was bigger: It was and is the most popular wine in America. When Cuellar looked at its sales numbers, he noticed something surprising. The graph of its growth 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. Cuellar found that bizarre. “This is really the gist of the paper,” he told me. “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, Cuellar feels strongly that we only think the Sideways Effect is real. He believes 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, Cuellar has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation—and they don’t.
But I think there is one. To understand it, though, you need to know about another component of the Sideways Effect. This one has to do with a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.
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 told me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two pinots cultivated in vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. And this distinct expression is part of what wine people geek out about.
“Once you love pinot noir, you love pinot noir and you explore pinot noir,” Kathy Joseph told me. “It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.”
Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a sauvignon blanc that was name-checked in Sideways, but she also makes a pinot noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow. “Probably more than any grape, pinot noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel,” she said: a cool climate, good drainage, a place that isn’t too nutrient rich. And all of that is expensive.
That finickiness and cost had made pinot a kind of specialty grape in America—a “fanatic’s grape,” as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass.
And then along came Sideways.
Pinot noir is Miles’ favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s describing not just a grape. He’s also describing himself.
It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s, you know, it’s not a survivor like cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, pinot needs constant care and attention. And, in fact, it can only grow in these really specific, little tucked-away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then, I mean, oh, its flavors—they’re 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. A Nielsen analysis found that sales of pinot spiked 16 percent in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by that overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it.
In California, production of pinot noir has increased 75 percent in the years since. But there was a lag at first, because it takes four or five years for a grape vine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price.
Farrell, the wine buyer at Brooklyn Wine Exchange, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis back in 2006, when a customer ordered a glass of pinot. “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 $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?”
Grown correctly, pinot is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. But after Sideways came out, not only was there more demand for pinot; there was specifically more demand 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. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be, and attended to less carefully. And that means that a lower-quality product starts making it into bottles.
A paper from 2021 found that most of the frenzied pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley—the sunny, fertile, hot California breadbasket that wasn’t even good for merlot. The result, Farrell told me, was “a flood of really bad pinot noir.”
But even good pinot noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker—like the person who ordered the $12 glass of pinot at Farrell’s sports bar—was looking for.
“They returned it,” Farrell said. “They said, ‘Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.’ ”
He told me he hadn’t known anything about wine at the time, but he understands now that “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 the exact opposite.”
Wine producers needed to please these customers who wanted a pinot that didn’t taste like a pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because growers hadn’t been anticipating that pinot would be the next big thing. Farrell said that “less scrupulous producers of pinot noir” came up with a solution: They started adding 25 percent syrah to their pinot noir.
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 need only 75 percent of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. And all of that extra syrah made the pinot go down easier. “Real unadulterated pinot noir, in addition to being very expensive, it’s not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted,” Farrell said.
I’m not saying that pinot noirs all became phony-baloney overnight—that they all got bad or all tasted like syrah. And in the long term, this surge of 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.
While this made for a bunch of lousy pinot, the irony is, it made for better merlot.
“There was a ton of really good merlot that was available for super cheap,” merlot maker Jeff Bundschu told me. “The red blends in the 10 years … after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy a merlot, were way effin’ better.”
You may have suspected this already, but I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this story, 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 it tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate.
I know that this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.
“You could ask somebody, ‘You like that movie? 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,’ ” Bundschu said. “You ask them about a wine, and they’re like, ‘I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.’ ”
Wine can be intimidating, and that’s at least as important to the Sideways Effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little idiosyncratic movie that went big could have such an impact: People want guidance about wine. And we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, even a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely effect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable—a guy who says, at a wine tasting, that he can detect “the faintest soupçon of asparagus” and “a flutter of, like, a nutty Edam 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.
Miles’ 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 him. Maybe it’s all bigger than that. Maybe he influenced people to care more about wine altogether. And that’s the influence that might be big enough to extend to chardonnay.
That takes us back to economist Steve Cuellar, who published the paper that showed that both merlot and chardonnay sales plateaued 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. She pointed out to me that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wines by the glass at restaurants. Those glasses were mostly full of merlot and chardonnay.
“The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made,” she said. “Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy.”
Once she flagged this connection between merlot and chardonnay, I realized she wasn’t the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Sideways director Alexander Payne.
“Those are the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine,” he said. “People who knew wine would start saying, ‘Well, I’m ABC—anything but chardonnay.’ ”
Sideways author Rex Pickett noted it too: “The waiter would say, ‘Red or white?,’ and if you said white, it was going to be some really cheap probably chardonnay. And if it was red, it was going to be merlot.”
So here were these twinned wines, merlot and chardonnay, then Sideways came along and cursed one of them out and ever so slightly shaded the other. “I thought you hated chardonnay,” Jack says to Miles. His response: “No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate chardonnay in California.”
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.
Another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers that our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting. But it also made clear that there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve gotta stay away from merlot, I’ve gotta drink pinot. But you could also walk out thinking, Huh, I should learn some more about wine.
Cuellar’s graphs of merlot and chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers curtailing something. 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.
Bundschu told me he believed that Miles’ disdain for merlot “gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down.” When I asked him if he really thought that people were trusting their own palates as opposed to trusting just Miles, he said, “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.”
In the years after Sideways, the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie is set, became a bustling tourist destination. The wine market doubled, and wine lists diversified way beyond merlot and chardonnay. All that amounts to another theory of the Sideways Effect: that the movie encouraged wine drinkers to branch out.
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 had opened it on any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity. … And it tastes so fucking good.
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. Miles’ rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance. They represent two ways of appreciating wine—and life.
Cuellar’s paper about merlot and chardonnay sales covered only 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. In the years since Sideways, the overall percentage of merlot, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.
Which brings us to the final wrinkle in this story: that Miles, the guy who destroyed merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.
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About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine: a 1961 Cheval Blanc. He tells Maya he had been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary but is now just waiting for a special occasion.
In one of the final scenes, he finds out that 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 circumstances, the wine shines through.
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This shining wine, as director 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 or 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.
This love-hate thing is right at the heart 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 reconnected with Laura Lippman, who rejected merlot like RoboCop at her neighborhood liquor store, 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 a wine store and bought a bottle of merlot. She took that bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass. “And I thought it was terrific, actually,” she said. “And I was like, I will do this again. I will drink merlot again.”
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