Spirits of the Dead
Pairing wine with movies! See the trailers and hear the fascinating commentary for these movies, and many more, at Trailers From Hell. This week, we conjure up some wine pairings for three spooky movies.
Our wine pairings this week are for ghost wineries. These are winemaking outfits which were doing good business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then came phylloxera, or fire, or Prohibition, or The Great Depression. Some wineries were able to trudge through the bad times and come out on the other side. Others were not so lucky. The ghost wineries that are back in business today were likely resurrected by an angel who had the money, time, and inclination to care for a ghostly field of neglected grapevines.
We’re cheating a bit here, because 1964’s Seance on a Wet Afternoon is more a crime story than a ghost story. It was such a good story, that somebody wrote an opera based on the screenplay and the novel which preceded both. That’s fertile content.
Myra Savage and her husband kidnap a girl so that Myra can run a seance and help the police find the victim. Of course, Myra knew all the time the kid was upstairs, waiting to be “found.” She wanted to make a name for herself as someone in touch with the spirit world, like Jeane Dixon, or Houdini’s widow, or Mary Todd Lincoln, although those people were never successful in tapping into the occult.
Nor was Myra. If she had been any good, she could have contacted her own son, who died at birth, but she didn’t. Eventually, she reveals the caper while in a “trance,” and the child is unharmed. Maybe she should have contacted Kathryn Kuhlman for advice on how to squeeze a dollar out of a ouija board.
Far Niente was abandoned for 60 years, but reports of it’s alive and well now. The winery was raised from the weeds in the late 1970s. Their 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon will run a man $300. In the weeds no more.
The Changeling is a 1980 Canadian thriller, directed by Peter Medak, a Hungarian-born filmmaker. Big names lit up the marquee, like George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, and Melvyn Douglas.
The story centers on a composer who moves from NYC to Seattle and rents a mansion. Renting a mansion has to run into a few bucks. Maybe stay in a hotel for a while until you’re sure this is the place for you? But no, he takes the mansion, which has been empty for a dozen years, and that’s the first sign that he should have opted for the hotel.
It doesn’t take long for more hints to drop. Loud banging, water running, and apparitions also fail to move him to the hotel. He thinks the ghost may be a girl who was killed in a traffic accident in 1909, but some digging reveals that Seattle didn’t have traffic in 1909.
A politician enters the picture at some point, the final hint that maybe that “vacancy” sign on the highway was not a half-bad idea. Our hero struggles through though, finally conducting a seance which allows him to have a conversation with a dead child. There’s an indoor earthquake, a fall from the second floor, and a house afire before the credits roll. This movie was considered a box office success, even though it only made 12-million dollars. They must have financed it with change from the couch cushions.
Buena Vista Winery is the second oldest winery in California. Founded in 1857 by a wily Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy, a tip of the hat to our wily half-Hungarian director. The winery went bankrupt 20 years later, after Haraszthy’s death. This is one ghost winery which really does have a ghost, so they say. The founder’s apparition reportedly still roams around the barrel room when it thinks no one is looking. Their 2021 Sheriff of Buena Vista will knock on the table twice to let you know it costs $55.
1944’s The Uninvited, a Ray Milland classic, features a story about a woman who is haunted by her mother. A lot of women can say that about mom, even though she’s still alive.
A brother and sister buy a house with an ocean view, and the ocean view proves to be the only good thing about the property. A young woman becomes a frequent visitor after being drawn in by the memory of her mother, who fell off the cliff years ago and got an even more close-up view of the ocean. Excitement? There’s a ghost, a seance, a heart attack, a psych ward stay, an identity switcheroo and, well, there’s that cliff again. Plus, it is my wife’s favorite ghost movie. So, it is also mine.
Did someone say cliff? Vine Cliff Winery is on Napa’s Silverado Trail. Most of what you see there today is reconstructed. Fire consumed the original winery, which was built in the 1870s. Vine Cliff goes full blast today, with a $125 Oakville Cabernet Franc as one of their more enticing offerings.
https://www.vinecliff.com/napa-valley-ghost-wineryies