Cheers! to Hollywood

The Marilyn Merlot is the perfect blend of Hollywood and vine - a California Merlot with an image of screen icon Marilyn Monroe on the label. The wine brings together "the vivacious appeal of Marilyn Monroe and Napa Valley wine-making of equal style and allure". But it doesn't come cheap, with vintages costing up to $3,000 a bottle.

Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman says that her favourite red wine is a 1975 Petrus, selling for around $1,500 a bottle. Mel Brooks favours Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, while Jim Carrey prefers an $800 bottle of Chateau Latour.

The film world's celebrities don't just drink wine, they collect it like Imelda Marcos collected shoes. Stars, agents, producers and directors have cellars of the stuff. Wine auctions have become star-studded affairs. Frasier star David Hyde Pierce was among the celebrities who attended when the official guild of champagne makers launched an LA chapter. LA actors say "cheers" in a wine club called Hollywood Pour Boys. Top-of-the-range cars come with a custom-made wine cooler in the trunk.

Celebrities make wine too. Some put their name to perfume, cosmetics or underwear. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola, bottle their success. When the award-winning director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now began bottling wine three decades ago, the sceptics dubbed it "Francis' folly". Now the Niebeaum-Coppola estate in California's Napa Valley makes a quarter of a million cases under various labels each year with Coppola making more money as a vintner that he ever did as a film-maker.

The attraction of wine for both business and pleasure has been explained by likening good wine to a Hollywood career - it's constantly evolving and gaining in intensity and flavour until it peaks, then it begins its inevitable descent.

The connection between movies and wine comes even closer in the new Oscar-nominated comedy Sideways, the story of friends Miles and Jack on a wine-tasting road trip through the vineyards and wineries of California. The differing lifestyles of the would-be writer and struggling actor are reflected in the age-old debate between Pinot and Cabernet - one being complicated, layered and difficult to produce, the other far more hardy and easily pleasing.

Director Alexander Payne admits: "I drank a lot of wine in the making of this film." He continued pouring during the promotional tour, when interviews were accompanied by wine-tastings. "The Syrah's quite nice, I'll have a taste of that," he declared as we began talking.

Amateur wine lover Payne, who also made Election and About Schmidt, travelled up the Santa Barbara coast meeting winemakers and drinking wine to research the movie. "I always wanted Sideways to be a bit of a love letter to the wine county as well as a portrait of these two guys," he says.

"I learnt enough about wine to know I still don't know a whole lot. I've come to see that knowing wine is kind of like yoga. It's something you practise but never master."

The script - which he wrote with Jim Taylor - attracted calls from the reps of "quite famous people" but he preferred to cast lesser-known, less-bankable leading actors Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church.

Neither knew a great deal about wine beforehand. "I don't think either of them drinks very much and neither knows very much about wine," says Payne.

"They were drinking concoctions of grape juice and other juices to match the colour of the wines. I didn't care what they were drinking as long as the Syrah looked like Syrah and the Cabernet looked like Cabernet."

Wine tours are big business in the States. The famous wine regions have large, tourist-friendly wineries where you can taste wine and buy memorabilia. Australia, New Zealand and France are doing the same.

The drinking didn't stop once the cameras stopped rolling. Many nights were spent in the Hitching Post restaurant where "they make such a good Pinot and the owners are so cool", says Payne. "We had about 80 people in the crew, and we'd all pile to the bar and out came the owners pulling out cases, telling us about the wine they were serving."

Unsurprisingly, vineyard owners were keen to be shown in the best possible light. For the winery in the picture that's shown as inferior, he invented Frass Canyon. "It's big and touristy but they actually do make a very respectable wine," says Payne. "We needed to trash a wine for comic purposes, so we renamed it."

The name was a joke - frass is an arcane English word, used by exterminators, meaning the excrement or droppings of insects. Those scenes were filmed at the winery owned by former actor Fess Parker, best known for playing western hero Davy Crockett on screen in the 1950s.

He's one of an increasingly number of celebrities around the world going further than Crackerjack comedian's Stu Francis' exhortation to "Crush a grape" and produce their own wine. Not just movie stars but sportsmen and singers are doing it too.

Golfer Greg Norman's self-confessed aim was "to make our brand synonymous with exceptional Australian wine". He spent five years setting up his wine-making operation. Formula One racer Mario Andretti has a Napa Valley winery.

Two years ago Sting bought a farm next to his Tuscan estate, which included chianti vineyards. He wanted to produce red wine, not for the general public but for drinking by him and his friends.

Cliff Richard's Vida Nova, produced with neighbours and fellow growers on his Portuguese estate, was for others. The Bachelor Boy singer enlisted the help of wine experts to develop the vineyard that came with the property he bought in 1993. His wine became Tesco.com's fastest ever seller three years ago.

His sometime singing partner Olivia Newton-John produces her own Koala Blue wine in Australia.

Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill owns a small family vineyard, Two Paddocks, in New Zealand. He began by planting five acres of pinot noir. The result was better than expected, causing the original idea of producing wine for family and friends to expand into a business. Two more vineyards have been added to the original to cope with growing demand.

Not everyone greets famous wine growers with open arms. French actor Gerard Depardieu clashed with villagers who claimed he'd used his financial muscle to pay over the odds and take a vineyard from local wine producers.

The actor has been a winemaker since 1982 and was attracted to the village after reading of its battle with Californian winemaking company Mondavi. They backed out of a plan to produce high class red wines, costing £40 a bottle, after opposition from villagers.

Embarrassingly, Depardieu was convicted of drink driving in France in 1990.

Perhaps the best-known celebrity wine-maker is Francis Coppola. Nearly 30 years ago he came across the California estate of Inglenook while seeking a summer property where he could make a little wine in the basement like his grandparents once did.

He was impressed by the story of founder Gustave Niebaum, a sea captain who'd used the fortune he made in the Alaskan fur trade to launch a winemaking business to rival the French. Coppola connected with Niebaum's immigrant background, love of wine and having a successful career outside wine. The director spent 20 years reconstructing the estate and restoring winemaking to the original chateau.

His daughter Sofia Coppola, director of Oscar-nominated Lost In Translation, has had a range of wine named after her - Sofia blanc de blancs. Her name is also on cans of the Sofia Mini, a single serve bubbly white wine.

Some celebrities don't make wine but help people enjoy it. TV's Richard and Judy have started a win e club on their daily C4 show. Viewers can learn about wine and buy from the couple's TV wine club as part of the show's desire to put an end to "wine snobbery".

* Sideways (15) is now showing in cinemas.

Published: 29/01/2005