Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies and many more at Trailers From Hell. This week, we will pair wines with three films dealing in darkness. Darkness is a hallmark of a good wine. Red wine, anyway. If you have a dark white wine, you may have a rosé. Or you may have one of Bill Pullman's Chardonnays from Bottle Shock.
Red wines should be dark, I think, and the darker the better. That goes for the smell, too. Some folks don’t feel that a smell can be dark, but I disagree. Blackberry? Blueberry? Cassis? Pepper? All dark, and all perfectly good descriptors for perfectly good red wines.
The 2019 film, Dark Waters, stars Mark Ruffalo, the guy who should play me in my biopic if Bill Pullman is unavailable. It covers the legal action after the discovery in the 1990s that DuPont was killing cattle with a dump of its toxic leftovers. Toxic leftovers is what we call the menu at the food truck down the street.
This poisonous dreck was a byproduct of making Teflon, and was not only killing cows in West Virginia but also giving the good people of The Mountain State cancer. Teflon or not, the court challenges did stick, costing DuPont hundreds of millions of dollars. And that was back when hundreds of millions of dollars was real money.
For Dark Waters, we could look to West Virginia for a nice red wine, if it were more of a wine-friendly state. The top wineries in the WV do use some traditional wine grapes, but they rely a lot on varieties like Vidal Blanc and Noirette, when they aren't going with blackberries or vegetables. I am told the garlicky Kirkwood Appalachian Ramp Wine is great for cooking, but I'm going to let you find out about that.
Let's pair Cosentino's The Dark, a $25 Lodi red wine described in the blurb as "dark and brooding," which also probably describes the mood of someone choking down a wine made from ramps. Or the boardroom at DuPont after Dark Waters hit the screens.
The Dark Crystal is from 1982. This dark fantasy was directed by muppet masters Jim Henson and Frank Oz. It is one of those fantasy stories where every third word is a made-up person, thing, activity or place, so there is no making sense of it unless you buy into it and watch.
The action hinges around the Crystal of Truth, which is broken and needs to be fixed before the three suns merge. Leave it to some cute little animatronic Gelflings to save the world, whichever world it is that they are in.
Pair Apothic Dark with The Dark Crystal, a red wine bearing the California appellation. If you've ever had the regular Apothic, you probably thought that was the dark one. Apothic Dark is frightfully dark, enough so that we can just go ahead and call it black. As in a black hole, as in no light gets through. As in the pot and the kettle are green with envy.
For those who feel that Westerns don't have nearly enough vampires in them, there is 1987's Near Dark. It features the late Bill Paxton, the guy who would have played me in my biopic if Mark Ruffalo and Bill Pullman were both unavailable. He gets a rare chance in this film to portray a psychotic vampire, no doubt the only such role on his IMDB page.
The movie-going public found a lot to like in the wedding of the Western and horror genres, with a little biker movie action thrown in for good measure. Near Dark was Kathryn Bigelow's debut as a director back in the '80s, when all things vampire were really hot. She has made some very popular films since then, including Point Break, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.
For Near Dark, here is VDR - Very Dark Red. It's a Monterey County blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Petite Sirah. All those magical grapes for right around $20. And no one gets bitten on the neck.
