Given that it would soon land like an atomic bomb in California wine country, it is hard to remember that upon its release, Sideways was one of the great mishandled works of American literature at the turn of the century. Miles, a down-and-out author and the protagonist of the story, however, would have been reminded immediately of Herman Melville after the ruinous publications of his critically reviled novel Moby-Dick and his final work, Clarel. Not only was the latter remaindered—written off and sold to sellers for a few cents—but when readers proved unwilling even to pay pennies for the book, Melville’s publisher forced him to sign, personally, the form ordering the book’s pulping.
Moby-Dick and Clarel, of course, survived the caprices of the publishing industry, and so too has author Rex Pickett’s masterwork, Sideways. The novel owes its rediscovery to Alexander Payne’s film of the same name, and its literary longevity to the authenticity oozing from every page. Miles knows wine because Pickett knows wine. Miles knows the pain of the publishing world because Pickett knows that pain too well. And anyone who has ever loved and lost can experience the paralyzing pain and loneliness felt by Miles in the aftermath of a collapsed marriage and an ex-wife moving on with her life.
Sideways moved mountains in the wine world, not because Rex Pickett set out to change the way we think about wine, but because he tapped into an unrecognized truth about wine’s place in the human experience. One need not be a wine connoisseur, own a EuroCave, or recognize the name “Riedel” to know instinctively that after a wedding ceremony, you raise a glass of champagne to the newlyweds. The first miracle of Christ was turning water into wine. The first thing Noah did after stepping off the ark was plant a vineyard. Wine was inseparable from the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. On a first date at an expensive restaurant, the wine list becomes a leather-bound minefield; what one chooses says as much about his or her character as the conversation to come. Rarely has ordering the cheap stuff by the glass been considered the safest path to a second date.
Regardless of one’s country or culture, wine has always been fully integrated with our lives, yet few have managed to capture in literature why that is or what its implications might be. When Sideways the novel and Sideways the film caught fire, Merlot was, at the time, having a moment on the wine scene. It had become the inescapable grape dominating restaurant menus after the “big Napa Cab” had exhausted our palates. Pickett, through Miles, asserted that the emperor had no clothes and, more importantly, humanized an alternative. Pinot Noir, said Miles, “enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet—or liver, whichever came first—gave out.”
No novel before or since has so fundamentally transformed the $64 billion American wine industry. After Miles snarled famously—both in the novel and on film—that he would storm out of a double date if anyone ordered a bottle of Merlot, Pinot Noir grape growing in California rose over 650 percent over the ensuing years, while Merlot decreased. Economists called it the “Sideways Effect.” Twenty years later, Pinot Noir outsells Merlot by hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States, the exact opposite of things before Rex Pickett had his say.
The reason, on some level, is obvious. Never had anyone so romanticized a grape and, by extension, its wine. Indeed, Sideways introduced many casual wine drinkers to the idea that varietals yielded wines of different character. Moreover, Pickett’s prose ripped down walls and made wine an egalitarian pursuit. After Sideways, the domain of fine wine no longer belonged exclusively to some monocled aristocracy. Rather, he gave wine back to the common person—the people to whom it always truly belonged. Vineyards are just farms with the same John Deere tractors, country music stations, and manure-covered boots found on Kansas cornfields. And if Miles, a lonely, starving writer one week away from eviction, could so relate to wine—could, indeed, find a momentary transcendence for which each of us in some way pines—then perhaps, too, could we through wine.
Beyond the bottles sold, the blockbuster film, the Academy Awards, and the transformation of Santa Ynez from “the poor man’s Napa/Sonoma,” as Pickett described it, to a thriving tourist destination, a word must be spared for the undeniable literary achievements of Sideways. It is a beautifully written novel: sensitive, evocative, and sparing, with dialogue at once genuine, joyful, awkward, and moving. Pickett’s darkly humorous prose captures the pathos that underlies life—that, indeed, makes life worth living. We are going to die, each of us, and every good conversation, lively or muted, jubilant or melancholy, is driven on some level by that one simple fact.
But not yet. And so we reach firmly for the corkscrew and grab the bottle by the neck, and twist the one into the other. Beneath that two-inch cork is an elixir sublime, that in turn can fuel sublime experiences. That is what Rex Pickett understood when writing Sideways and what readers learn with each elapsing page of one of the great literary works of our age.
—David W. Brown,
wine essayist and
author of The Mission