Cue Napa for Its Close-Up

The phrase "bottle shock" refers to a temporary condition that afflicts wine, often immediately after bottling or during transport, and damages its flavor. In the movie "Bottle Shock," which opens Aug. 6, it's the wine industry that is shaken up, and the condition is anything but temporary.

The bottle at the center of the drama, loosely based on the 1976 "Judgment of Paris" blind-tasting competition, is the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay that bested five other white wines from California and four from France. The event put California wines on the map and accelerated the industry's globalization.

The movie has a star-studded cast headed by the great Alan Rickman as Steven Spurrier, a struggling British wine retailer in Paris who organized the tasting as a PR stunt, and Bill Pullman as winemaker Jim Barrett, who also was struggling after buying Chateau Montelena in 1972.

Filmed at several wineries including Chateau Montelena, Buena Vista and Kunde, "Bottle Shock" celebrates the beauty of the business from a behind-the-scenes perspective in the same way 2004's "Sideways" captured amateurs' enthusiasm for wine. And just as "Sideways" put Santa Barbara County on the map as a winemaking region, the panoramic helicopter shots of rolling vineyards in "Bottle Shock" no doubt will provide a further boon to Napa tourism and could well make Chateau Montelena a household name.

The Washington Post's June 13, 1976, article on the results of the Paris tasting warned that Chateau Montelena Chardonnay was "no longer available in Washington." But in advance of the release of "Bottle Shock," you can find more recent vintages, still made in the same signature style, giving you a chance to beat the rush this time.

In honor of "Bottle Shock," we tasted several white wines made by three men who played a role in the creation of the award-winning 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay: the chateau's current winemaker, Bo Barrett, son of founder Jim Barrett; then-winemaker Mike Grgich, who now heads Grgich Hills Estate (pronounced "gir-gitch"); and Grgich's then-assistant Gustavo Brambila, now a partner in the Gustavo Thrace winery. Our side-by-side-by-side tasting of their chardonnays found hints of a common lineage.

Our first whiff of Karen's pick was without a trace of wood (even though the wine spends six to eight months on oak), so we easily could have mistaken its lean aromas as coming from an Old World chablis instead of a California chardonnay. Still made without malolactic fermentation (a secondary process that softens a wine's flavors), the Barretts' 2005 Chateau Montelena Napa Valley Chardonnay ($40) is such an ethereally understated and well-integrated wine that it almost seems as if it sprang into being fully formed, like water.

Grgich and Brambila left Chateau Montelena in 1977 to start Grgich Hills Estate. Surprisingly light-bodied for a wine so full-flavored, the 2005 Grgich Hills Napa Valley Chardonnay ($40) exhibits a distinct and appealing toasty flavor and is Andrew's pick this week. It reminds him of the first great California chardonnays he enjoyed in the 1970s and early 1980s, before many of them became big and clumsy with oak.

Brambila grew up doing yardwork for Grgich, who praised his hardworking nature. In 1976, after Brambila became one of the first Mexican Americans to graduate from the oenology program at the University of California at Davis, Grgich hired him.

University of Maryland alum Thrace Bromberger met Brambila in 1996, and the two teamed up to create Gustavo Thrace. Bromberger characterized her partner to us in a May 18 letter as "almost painfully shy . . . and astounded that anyone would put his persona into a movie." Portrayed on screen by Freddy Rodríguez ("Ugly Betty," "Six Feet Under") as a romantic rival to Chris Pine's Bo Barrett, Brambila might want to get used to the attention. We loved his 2004 Gustavo Thrace Carneros Chardonnay ($30), which was uniquely alluring. Its faint nose of goat's milk followed by pear fruit, notes of fresh fennel and wet-stone minerality united to make us crave it with cedar-planked salmon.

The Barretts, Grgich, Brambila and their colleagues didn't achieve a victory only for California in 1976. After centuries of French supremacy, their efforts inspired other winemakers globally with the hope that their wines, too, might one day come to be seen as world-class. The quality level of wine all around the globe has risen dramatically in the decades since, and that may be the longest-lasting shock of them all.

Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page can be reached through their Web site, http://www.becomingachef.com, or at food@washpost.com.