The Sonoma City Council cleared the way at its July 18 meeting for an independent film production company to use the city’s streets as a backdrop for shooting “Bottle Shock” – a film of how the Sonoma and Napa valleys’ wine industry made it on the map forever.
“Bottle Shock” will chronicle the lives of the Chateau Montelena founders Jim Barrett and his son Bo and will feature events leading up to the famous Paris wine tasting of 1976 wherein California wines bested exalted French wines in a blind tasting – and the rest is history.
Brenda Lhormer, the film’s producer who has operated the Sonoma Valley Film Festival for the past six years, told council that her production team will work diligently as to not interfere with the natural flow of business around the plaza.
In order to gain the council’s approval, Lhormer pleaded her case in microscopic detail. Armed with, among other things, a detailed street-closure plan, a certificate of insurance, and an alphabetical list of nearly 40 plaza merchants who had been personally briefed on the film regarding its potential positive and negative financial impacts to their businesses.
Even those amongst the film project’s letter-writing opposition offered their in-person support upon learning of Lhormer’s guarantee to the council that her film-production company will offer compensation to businesses that demonstrate financial losses.
Will feature ‘Harry Potter’ star
Borys Kit, of the Hollywood Reporter, wrote on Friday that the cast of the film will include Chris Pine, Rachael Taylor, Eliza Dushku, Bill Pullman and Alan Rickman.
Pine will play the vineyard owner’s son who rescues the winery and represents Napa at the tasting in Paris; Taylor will play an intern/university student at the winery; Pullman will be the proprietor of the less than up-to-date winery who is in conflict with his son; Rickman will portray an Englishman administering the L’Academie du Vin in Paris and will portray the mastermind behind the blind-taste challenge yielding an American vintage upset victory.
Rickman starred as Severus Snape in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and soon will play in Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd.”
Businesses that may be a part of the filming process include the Swiss Hotel, Della Santina Deli/Restaurant, J. Sumner gallery, Chanticleer books, Filigree Estate Jewelers, Maya Restaurant, Pacific Union, Tiddle E. Winks, the Ledson Hotel, Toscana Hotel, and Bank of America.
Lhormer told the council that filming is set to begin in the first part of August with partial closures on East Napa Street and Spain Street – although she added that an independent film’s production has lots of last-minute changes.
