Sour Grapes – first look review

For a time, Rudy Kur­ni­awan was the dash­ing young prince of the Amer­i­can wine scene. As the econ­o­my was boom­ing in the run-up to the 2008 finan­cial crash, vin­tage wine became the sta­tus sym­bol of choice for many rich one-per­centers, and through flog­ging his appar­ent­ly end­less col­lec­tion – once declared to be of ​“arguably the great­est cel­lar on Earth” – Kur­ni­awan turned an enor­mous prof­it. Before they dis­cov­ered the truth, a lot of wealthy peo­ple were made very hap­py by this like­able and charis­mat­ic stranger.

Recall­ing Orson Welles’ F for Fake, Sour Grapes opens up a debate about the val­ue of authen­tic­i­ty. Kur­ni­awan was such a nat­ur­al at fake wine alche­my that he duped numer­ous rich con­nois­seurs (includ­ing Bill Koch, of the noto­ri­ous Koch line, who dropped a cool $4m on Kur­ni­awan wines, and who is depict­ed here as a Charles Fos­ter Kane-esque fig­ure con­duct­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion from his own pri­vate Xanadu), while sev­er­al of his close friends still insist that Kur­ni­awan was respon­si­ble for some of the best times they ever had. Can a man who incites such good feel­ings ever tru­ly be a fraud?

Reuben Atlas and Jer­ry Roth­well don’t match Welles for nar­ra­tive tom­fool­ery or visu­al splen­dour – who could? – but Sour Grapes shares a sense of mis­chief with F for Fake, its co-direc­tors rev­el­ling in their bizarre true tale. Like Welles, Atlas and Roth­well take a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion in the con and its even­tu­al unrav­el­ling. Along with Koch and his per­son­al PI, French wine­mak­er Lau­rent Pon­sot retraces his steps in unmask­ing Kur­ni­awan as a char­la­tan, vac­u­um­ing up easy cash from (most­ly white, most­ly male, most­ly bored and eager to burn their ​“fuck you” mon­ey) peo­ple hard­ly both­er­ing to check whether their extor­tion­ate­ly-priced plonk was the real deal.

It’s not that the experts were ever real­ly fooled. We see that Kur­ni­awan wasn’t even a par­tic­u­lar­ly good forg­er, mis­spelling labels and cre­at­ing vin­tages that he didn’t realise nev­er even exist­ed, but many of Kurniawan’s cus­tomers appear to have been ama­teur wine-bros who thought the rare wine game could be played by any­one, while those auc­tion­eers and sell­ers involved on Rudy’s end of the scheme – whether work­ing in col­lu­sion or just plain dumb – were all mak­ing too much mon­ey to care where the prod­uct came from. The film echoes Adam McKay’s recent rigged mar­ket dra­ma The Big Short in that way, sug­gest­ing that it was no one man but an entire rot­ten, com­plic­it sys­tem at fault.

A fine con caper, Sour Grapes is also notable as a study of a fig­ure who nev­er once appears in per­son (Kur­ni­awan declined to be inter­viewed for the film, from his new home at Taft Cor­rec­tion­al Insti­tute in Cal­i­for­nia). He is Sour Grapes’ elu­sive ghost, spo­ken about by for­mer asso­ciates in the past tense and only ever appear­ing in archive footage. We nev­er get a sense of the man him­self – about his motive, or how he man­aged to forge thou­sands of bot­tles unaid­ed (vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble, reck­ons Pon­sot). The film leaves us with some frus­trat­ing lin­ger­ing ques­tions about who Rudy Kur­ni­awan real­ly was, although the jour­ney is no less enjoy­able for it.