© NVFF

The cast run through Bottle Shock at the Napa Valley Film Festival.

Bottle Shock – the Musical opens next year, so Justin Lowe took a sneak preview.

Rumours about a musical adaptation of the comedic drama Bottle Shock that have been circulating around Northern California wine country for the past year or more were emphatically confirmed when the Napa Valley Film Festival (NVFF) recently presented a live version of the show in the historic village of Yountville.

Directed by Randall Miller, the independently produced 2008 film was set in the Napa Valley and focused primarily on Chateau Montelena's creation of the renowned 1973 Alexander & Napa Valleys Chardonnay, which ultimately triumphed over a selection of Burgundy grand and premier cru whites at the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting organized by British wine writer and consultant Stephen Spurrier.

With the 40th anniversary of the historic event approaching next year, Bottle Shock musical co-creators James Sasser and Vincent Burwell brought their 70's-era rock and roll musical to the Lincoln Theater on November 14 for a staged read-through before an enthusiastic audience of festival attendees, local residents and wine industry professionals, including Chateau Montelena's Bo Barrett and Gustavo Brambila of Gustavo Wine, who are each depicted in both the movie and the musical.

Sasser and Burwell have been developing the show for the past couple of years in workshop settings with the goal of launching the production next October in San Francisco – the film festival debut marked the first public performance, however. A cast of a dozen actors read from the script onstage and performed songs from the musical, backed by a seven-piece electric/acoustic band, although at this early juncture, costuming and scenery were omitted from the presentation.

The show opened with the entire cast singing the overture Best Wine in the World, then transitioned to scene-setting dialogue from the Chateau Montelena characters before the arrival of Spurrier, who introduced himself with the understated line: "I'm on a fact-finding mission of sorts."

"One of the things that excites me about this musical in particular is that it’s about real people," Sasser told Wine-Searcher. The show features more than a dozen duets and solos offered by the principal characters, including Jim Barrett (played by Calum Grant), Bo Barrett (Colin McAdoo), Steven Spurrier (James Sasser), winemaker Brambila (Diego Garcia), harvest intern Sam Fulton (Ashley Bening) and Calistoga bartender Jo (Taylor Bartolucci), supported by a five-member chorus.

"Of course the show has to rock, the show has to sing," Sasser added, and so it does. Engagingly wine-centered tunes like Jim's "Dyin' On The Vine", "Summer in a Bottle" (with Sam soloing) and Judgment of Paris (featuring a duet by Spurrier and Bo) tell the story of Chateau Montelena's unique role in the French tasting to an infectious beat. "I thought it was just really entertaining," said NVFF co-founder Brenda Lhormer, who was integral to organizing the film festival performance. "I think it has a ton of potential."

Bo Barrett, a major musical theater fan himself, particularly seemed to enjoy the Lincoln Theater performance. "I was really excited to see how they made it work, because frankly at first glance it's not something that you would perceive to be that adaptable," he reflected. "The adaptation worked – I couldn't see it, but now I get it."

Speaking with Wine-Searcher about the upcoming Judgment of Paris 40th anniversary, Barrett recalled how the results of the tasting shifted the entire landscape of the American wine industry. "The artisan wines like Chateau Montelena by 1976 were pretty strong" in California, he noted, but getting traction beyond the state was challenging. Once the results of the Paris blind tasting were released, "we were then able to get our wines placed in places on the East Coast or other metropolitan areas that had been extremely Eurocentric. So it really broke down the monopoly for fine wine in one summer," he said.

Barrett attributed the superior quality of the 1973 Chardonnay in part to his father Jim's dedication to classic winemaking tradition and his confidence in the quality of the regional terroir. "We just used the best grapes we could find at that time," he said.

At a post-performance wine tasting, Chateau Montelena joined a number of other wineries represented at the Paris competition, including Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, which bested four Bordeaux classified growths to win the red category.

Chateau Montelena poured their 2012 Napa Valley Chardonnay, which Barrett said was "actually as similar to the '73 as you can get – very minimalist, very fruit-driven, very European styling". In the final analysis, he concluded "that is probably why we and Stag's Leap won that tasting, because our wines were made to those European standards, but with the superior sunlight of California."