The Sideways phenomenon: Rising Pinot Noir & falling Merlot prices

While Neil is off writing thoughtful posts about wine bars in Austin, TX or wine reviews, I’ve been goofing around. What’s worse is I’ve been goofing around making graphs about wine — quite the geeky thing to do, I know.

I was reading some wine blogs today, and I came across this post at Pinotblogger.com about the climbing prices of Pinot Noir grapes in California. The Pinot prices started to climb in 2004, which is just about when the movie Sideways came out. And we all remember Paul Giamatti’s character gushing eloquently about his love for Pinot Noir while cursing Merlot. So I decided to get the Merlot side of the story, and then I took it too far and made this figure.

Behold the Sideways phenomenon. I can’t say that I’m surprised. (And the grape sales tracked each other so nicely until 2004.)

These prices are for California grape sales only, and data for this figure came from the California Grape Crush Report.