Wine goes to the movies with
by Randy Fuller
It only takes about 20 minutes for a glass of wine to enter your bloodstream and head for the small intestine, pancreas and liver. It's the liver's company in that sentence that keeps it off my dinner table.
Getting alcohol out of your system takes quite a bit longer. It's been trying to get out of my system for years and it's losing the battle.
In his 1987 film, "Innerspace," director and TFH head guru Joe Dante does that "into-and-out-of-the-bloodstream" odyssey in 120 minutes. Navy flyboy Dennis Quaid is shrunk and injected into dweeby Martin Short, embarking him on a voyage that's no less fantastic and quite a bit funnier than this movie's 1966 inspiration.
Quaid's character starts the movie at a party, sloppy drunk, then plays around with a robot that can't pour a drink. Better the clumsy robot had been working the party instead of the bartender. Short's wimp opens in a doctor's office, soon to find out that it's not hypochondria if there really is something inside you.
"Innerspace" is the only flick I have ever seen in which a chase scene is interrupted for the bad guy to reload his arm. Speaking of which, our heroic test pilot has to reload on Southern Comfort while surfing the red corpuscles. He could have been arrested for driving while inoculated.
It is a spy movie, but the drinking in "Innerspace" lacks the urbane class of James Bond's "shaken, not stirred." When the characters drink, it's more like "shaking and slurred."
The Oscar-winning special effects were done pre-CGI, and are still so impressive that for much of the inside-the-body sequences I had the irresistible urge to cough up something. Meg Ryan, as the love interest, is as fresh and perky as a Sauvignon Blanc, while tiny Kevin McCarthy is as cute as a bottle of airline wine. Let’s pair a wine with "Innerspace" that's as blood-red as the scenery.
Treasure Hunter Black Submarine wine - 3Finger Wine produces this Knight's Valley Cabernet. I can't help but wonder if they had versions one and two, in which they kept adding fingers. It's hard to imagine giving one finger to a Napa Cab. Unless you're from Sonoma.
A few other bytes on the microchip:
Test Pilot wine - Cooper-Garrod Vineyards of Saratoga, California, has a trio of red blends they call their Test Pilot line. Winemaker George Cooper was a pilot in WWII. The rest of the Coopers and the Garrods only fly in aircraft equipped with flight attendants. Are the Test Pilot wines top-shelf or Top Gun? It'll cost $39 each to find out.
Wine Miniatures - For a movie about a miniature guy in a miniature submarine, how a miniature bottle of wine? TastingRoom.com offers sampler cases of little 50ml bottles, even tinier than those little wine bottles sold on airplanes.
Bilge Wine (Submarine Style) - This stuff sounds an awful lot like prison wine, and I won't be checking that box, either, on my wine club order form.
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