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We’re taking a break from shooting on the documentary while the winter weather keeps us out of vineyards, and so we’ve started preproduction on a narrative feature film called Vintage. We’re big fans of food in the movies, from Big Night to Ratatouille. This will be our attempt at a classic food and wine film done on a shoestring budget.

It will take us a year or three to make this feature as we simultaneously wrap the documentary, but we’re hoping to shoot the opening scene and some teaser material this winter to help with fundraising.

The lead and key roles will be non-union, paying gigs (incl. meals) while extras will be unpaid. We’ll be shooting from 2012-2013 as funding allows.

• Bruno [lead] – 40s-50s – a washed-up, frumpy restaurant critic and frustrated former bestselling writer who manages to retain some residual charm, and wh0′s about to get one last shot at resurrecting his career
• Anna – 35-45 – Bruno’s estranged wife, trying to hold it together, still has a soft spot for the overgrown child who is her ex-husband
• Sylvie – 30s-40s – French wine grower, hardworking farmer with a touch of class and business smarts
• R. Michaels - 30s-50s – Bruno’s rival wine critic; smooth
• Grovnick – 50s - Squirrely newspaper editor]
• Aleksie - 40s – 70s – Russian restauranteur and mob boss
• Chef  Berteau  - 30s-50s – No bullshit restaurant owner
• Cab Driver - 30s-50s -
• Drizzle – 20s – 40s – loan shark, wannabe rap star
• Waiter - 20s – 50s

Anyone interested should drop us a note. We’ll be casting in January, with auditions in PDX and Corvallis.

A fourth-generation chef, Chris took over the helm upon his father’s retirement in 2008, and since he’s been balancing maintaining the restaurant’s famous standbys with the invention of new dishes that allow him to pursue his creative impulses. He devotes two morning a week to kitchen experiments where he carries on his father’s “Freestyle Cooking,” a term Jack Czarnecki coined long before “fusion” was mainstream.

Chris draws plenty of inspiration from the impressive wine cellar beneath the historic home that is stocked with more than five hundred different pinots, most of them from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He’s even created his own label through a partnership with Stag Hollow Vineyards in Yamhill County.

Because you can’t make a film about wine without talking about food, I interviewed Chris about his experiences as a chef in the midst of one of the most noted wine regions in the world. He provided a chef’s perspective on food, cooking and pinot noir.

We’ve been hitting Twitter and our other social networks harder lately because of our fundraising campaign, and as a result, Matt Compton, who co-owns Spindrift with his wife Tabitha, noticed the chatter and invited us to an industry tasting to try their lineup.

I’m a filmmaker, not a wine writer, so I’m not used writing tasting notes. But I have to say the ’08 reserve Pinot is a steal. The ’10 Pinot Gris stood out. I liked the Gewurtz from 30 year old vines, and they offered an interesting Rose made from Pinot Noir that had a twist on a blush wine…it had bright acidity like a typical WV white. I guess I’ve been learning a few things about vino since starting this project. Or at least I know what I like, and Spindrift offers enough range at great prices to make this corner of the Valley worth a visit.

Matt got his start managing vineyards and worked throughout this section of the WV before striking out on his own, and they now produce around 4,000 cases. Sometimes you don’t have to look far for wine stories, and I’m sure we’ll be touring some of Matt’s vineyards down the road.

l should also note that I ran into Claire Cady of the Oregon Wine Blog, which is in the midst of being rebranded as “WestToast,” to cover an expanded range of topics in food and wine in the Northwest.

We spent a few days with Jay Selman, Rusty Gaffney, Eric Anderson and Brian Clark as they shared the inside scoop on the origins of the show, the “epiphany bottles” that turned them into lifelong connoisseurs, and some of their favorite moments during the course of interviewing nearly five hundred of the most noted personalities in the wine industry.

We filmed the recording of one of their shows in their Orange County studio and followed Jay as he prepped for an interview with guest Chad Kearns of Giracci Vineyards, a winemaker who recently opened a tasting room in the canyons southeast of Los Angeles. We toured Chad’s newly planted Granache and Mourvedre vineyards on his 10 acre wine and horse farm and then sat in the studio for the interview on the following day.

We collected 250 gigabytes of footage, photos and audio, heard tales of wine adventures that would have made Miles from Sideways proud, and shared a few bottles of some fantastic wine during the course of capturing another side of the American wine landscape: enthusiasts with encyclopedic knowledge who use the latest technology to share their passion with thousands of fans around the world.

The indie wine media universe grows more cluttered by the day, with new blogs, podcasts and Twitter feeds popping up everywhere you look. We even have to add our own project to the mix. But the Grape Radio crew continues to outpace the field, recently winning their second James Beard Award. Once we’ve sifted through the footage we hope to show what drives them to continue to share their enthusiasm for wine and get their insight on what wine means to our culture, what’s the definition of the term wine geek, the tendency of wines to share the personality of the person who made them, and what makes this drink such a significant part of life and culture.

Kegan Sims edited together this vignette that sums up the event:

Jim’s no less passionate than the winemakers we’ve interviewed at state-of-the-art facilities producing tens of thousands of cases per year. But he’s certainly taking a different approach to the professional winemaker’s calling.

Jim’s story is just the latest we’ve captured on our journey to find out how and why folks are compelled to move into the wine biz. We’ll be following him as he launches his first professional label, delivering one case at a time, by hand, to his customers.

We’re thrilled that our first film project, the short A Country Wedding, will be showing at the Salem Film Festival in October.  Screening schedules haven’t been released yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as they do.

We’re in full documentary/fundraising mode now with Vino Veritas, and we’re learning that a doc is quite different from a scripted film. But ACW was such a blast. We had an intense 5 days of shooting last summer, but the experience was so enjoyable because so many fantastic people were involved. I hope we’ll get to do more scripted material in the future, including exploring the feature version of the script, Killing Crows, on which ACW is based.

We’ll plan to meet up for dinner with the cast, crew and supporters who end up heading to Salem. More details to come.

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