Reviewer: James L.

John Cleese: Wine for the Confused. Are the Smartflix crew insane? Do they expect me to critique the work of a comic genius, this fine, honorable man whose boots I am not worthy to kiss? Then again, it’s an apt fit; I like wine. Enough of it makes me confused. I have avoided learning too much, because I would like to remain satisfied with simple – i.e., inexpensive – wines. The idea of spending $57 on a bottle of wine seems ridiculous; for that amount of money you could have a fine scotch that’s been waiting for you for 18 years, and will last a good while beyond the night. Expensive wine may have pleasures unknown, what with their jammy finishes and top notes of teak, grass, and the soft exhalations of a dreaming lark, but if it means that my favorite Australian wines will suddenly make me convinced I can taste the feet of the people who stomped the grapes, no thanks.

Hold on; I’d better have a glass while I review this. Back in a minute.

There. I’ve chosen a Shiraz from “Yellow Tail.” It’s very drinkable, which is something I like in a wine. I hate when you have to get out a stick and tamp it down your throat. Let’s hit play.

“Wine for the Confused” begins with a typically Pythonesque conceit: we seem to be watching a bad French sex farce from 1982, complete with subtitles, horrible haircuts, gallic dorks talking about women, and lots of wine glasses. You expect Mr. Cleese to enter the frame at any second, ask if we are confused, and proceed to teach us about wine. As it turns out, this is a promo for an upcoming DVD release of “The Decline of the American Empire.” After a few more promos for more DVDs I would accept only if I were stranded on a desert island and needed something reflective to signal planes, we begin: over footage of some Roman types quaffing wine, we hear Cleese in his taunting-Frenchman voice celebrate the mysteries and complexities of wahn. It’s funny. A little. Somewhat. Sigh. Well, “Holy Grail” was a long time ago, and –

- Hold on, what’s this? We cut to a shot of Cleese at his computer; he presses the eject button on his keyboard, removes the DVD we were presumably watching, and tosses it out the window with casual contempt. “There,” he sighs. “That’s just the sort of nonsense that helps perpetuate this awful snobbery about wine.”

Ahh. That’s our boy.

It takes about 17 additional seconds to realize that Cleese has probably never made a bad industrial or instructional film in his life, is constitutionally incapable of doing so, and appears to be one of the more well-balanced, contented, and amused men of our times. This could be an instructional video called Teach Yourself Ball-Bearing Repair At Home, and you’d watch it.

His main point: wine should be a pleasure; wine-snobbery is for bullies and bores; your tastes are your tastes. “There is one thing I do know about wine,” he says. “Don’t let anyone tell you what wine you should like.” Bravo. After a brief montage of the wine-making process we move on to a celebrity tasting: Mr. Cleese has assembled a dozen good-looking friends at his California house to sample wines, and we presume that some cheap brands will be mixed among the hoiter and/or toitier brands. I did this once while writing a piece on Beer Snobbery; served my friends a wide variety of lagers, including one glass that consisted of small portions of every other beer. It was judged the most undrinkable, and hence the most expensive, and probably Belgian. The winner was Harley-Davidson beer. The loser was the expensive upscale beer with the best label. Everyone was abashed. No one switched away from the expensive upscale beers with the best label. That’s the thing about wine: you can’t always pick up the proper status clues from the label, and once it’s in the glass, well, it could be anything. Stand in a bar with your fist around the neck of a beer with the right label, though, and you send out more messages than Western Union on Christmas Eve.

But I digress; Mr. Cleese is having a garden party. Everyone comes up with simple adjectives to describe their choices, and thus armed with descriptive terms, we follow Mr. Cleese through the California wine country to explore the attributes of various grapes. Almost nothing Mr. Cleese says is funny; he’s not trying to be funny. He’s not trying to be amusing. The general effect, however, is cheerful and relaxed. You know how you see an old star on an infomercial and feel bad for him, because it’s rather sad that he’s selling gravestone polish and automatic prune de-seeders? There’s none of that here. If Cleese spent the first and most famous part of his career as a Python, he’s spent the latter half bringing a delightful intelligence to the promotional and instructive genre – dignity and persona intact. He’ll drop a little story about the Pythons here, mention a lunch with the Queen a while later, but it’s done off-handedly, and if there’s anyone in the video who doesn’t appear to be overly impressed with John Cleese, it’s John Cleese.

You learn things, too – and unlike any other video I’ve reviewed, this is information I can put to practical application.

(Hic)

Verdict: high production values; crisp editing with notes of vanilla; smart script devoid of pretension; makes standing around talking to guys who drink wine all day look interesting; contains generous portions of Mr. Cleese’s inexhaustible charm. Five out of five grapes. Did you know they could make dry Riesling wines? They can.

(PS: there’s only one Python reference in this entire review. Did you find it?)

Reviewer: Rebecca K.

John Cleese is always fun to watch, and there were definitely some good basic tips in the program, especially how to describe the taste of wines that you like so you can get more of it. However, the wines investigated were limited to California. I would have liked to hear a little about Spanish wines and some other varietals. According to this video, they don't exist -- the Californocentric world view of wine.