Sour Grapes on Netflix

Do you like wine? I admit that I dabble every now and then and when I was in college I went to a couple of wine tastings in order to, I dunno, I guess to pretend as though I am more posh than I really am. To this day I will on occasion get my hands on a bottle or two but I honestly don't have any idea what I am doing and will admit I don't really know the difference between the various types of whites and reds.

There are some people out there that really do know the difference though, and pay tons of money for rare batches and bottles. There are also some people that seek to defraud this very lucrative market.

At the start of this documentary, we are introduced to a group of people that are self-proclaimed wine connoisseurs. It takes place in Los Angeles for the most part and the players involved in this club of wine fans are all extremely wealthy and it is just mind-blowing how much money they spend on one evening's worth of vino. Although they don't tell us exactly, there are several gatherings that they describe where hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on the bottles consumed at a single dinner.

In my mind, no matter how rich you are, this is crazy.

This part of the doco seems more like a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and it is quite interesting to see that a particular vintage or highly-sought-after bottle of wine can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I had a glass of wine from a $500 bottle that was 50 years old once in my life, and i thought it was disgusting so it is difficult for me to relate. Apparently wine collectors are the buying and selling of these collections are a very big business and that is part of what this film is about. It seems there are people out there that buy and sell bottles and cases of wine the same way that traditional investors look at stocks and trends in the markets. There is a real science behind it and some of these people don't even drink the stuff.

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A majority of the film focuses on Rudy Kurniawan though, and he is a wealthy business man (so he claimed) that has an incredible nose for wine and was well respected in the wine community internationally. He was so popular in fact that he was able to bring an wine auction house from obscurity to being the biggest and most popular in the world.

He was buying up massive stocks of wine with what appeared to be a rather limitless supply of money and then later creating artificial demand for these wines and selling them later at a hefty profit.

But then, he must have gotten greedy because one of his items up for auction was for a batch of bottles of wine from the 40's and they were going for big bucks. However, it was pointed out by someone working for the actual winery responsible for making these wines that those particular types of wine hadn't even been bottled until 1982.

This began the downfall of the charismatic and up to that point, well-liked Rudy.

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The reasons why I found this crime documentary interesting is because it combines two guilty pleasures of mine into one sitting: The unachievable lifestyle of the ultra-rich, and an extremely clever criminal that reached a bit too far and got busted.

Should I watch it?

I stayed entertained the entire way through and it is interesting to see how the people involved, many of who knew Rudy and were quite good "friends" with him have their opinion of him change over time. The maker of this documentary had the good fortune to start interviewing people before all the facts and investigations were done.

I don't think that it is necessary for anyone to be a fan of wine to appreciate this. However, if you do like to revel in the insane money that the ultra-rich will pay a consumable and I have to admit I was a little bit pleased about them getting duped.

It's only an hour and a half long and it stayed entertaining the entire way through. I was happy to see that they didn't try to do the usual Netflix thing and turn this into a 3 part mini-series and add 2 hours worth of unnecessary filler.