Mind Over Merlot

Can a Story Change Chemistry?

[Film folks: I’m hosting private screenings of Brother Verses Brother in NY and LA. Contact me if you’d like to sing to our wine bottles.]

I was stopping over for a night in Iceland, and decided to re-gift to a friend a bottle of cheap wine from my hotel in Paris. We opened it. Battery acid. Before he poured it into the moss, I asked him to try a different kind of decanting.

I said, “Imagine it’s a rare bottle from a micro-vineyard on a tiny island in the middle of a river in Southwest France. The family has tended these vines for 150 years. This is a legendary 1923 vintage - the year Europe was drunk with post-war exuberance. This bottle is worth $17,000. Let’s drink again.”

We drank. And it tasted complex, weirdly warm, rich. Spicy. Good. A wine that had been objectively awful was now special.

This same sorcery runs the way we experience movies.

The Alchemy of Perception

Imagine a movie called A Poet. It’s my favorite movie of last year - a Colombian heir to Sideways, where the hard-drinking Miles character doesn’t even have one friend. Find it on a free streaming site with a low-res thumbnail, and you might turn it off in ten minutes. Too depressing. But let a prestige distributor like A24, Mubi, Neon, Criterion, or 1 2 Special make a nice poster and charge money for it. We can see the film’s genius now - heartbreaking, riveting, hilarious. The film didn’t change. Or did it?

Distribution isn’t just logistics, it’s the friend telling you the bottle is worth $17,000 or she wrote a rave for a film on Letterboxd. I’ve seen this from the inside: a movie that feels like a disaster in a half-empty test-screening becomes a masterpiece once it’s framed by Cannes laurels and a prestige price tag.

Miles in Sideways, the poet in A Poet.

The Sideways Effect

We saw this play out nakedly with Sideways. Miles’s rant (“I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!”) didn’t just write itself into film history, it crashed Merlot’s market price and sent Pinot Noir sales surging. One grape became the wine of the unimaginative. The other became something to seek out and understand. The grapes didn’t change. The soil didn’t change. Only the story changed, and the culture’s palate shifted with it.

We are all Miles, all the time, riding the waves of narratives we didn’t write and mostly can’t see.

Dregs on the Edge of the Wineglass

There is a cynical read here: that we are just tricking our brains. The Japanese researcher or quack Masaru Emoto claimed that water exposed to loving words formed beautiful crystals, while water exposed to hostility formed chaotic ones. Science dismissed him when his results were unrepeatable.

And yet.

Are we so certain that perception is a one-way street? If a story can change the market value of a grape, or the way my mouth perceives a 2-dollar wine, is it possible that intention actually leaves a residue?

I challenge you to run an experiment. Get two identical bottles of the cheapest wine you can find. Spend an evening with Bottle A, cursing it, telling it it’s garbage, the barrel-of-piss treatment. Take out your childhood trauma on that bottle.

Bottle B gets the opposite. Speak to it as a lost relic, a legendary vintage that survived against all odds. And the greatest lover of your life.

Then take both bottles outside, and offer glasses to strangers without telling them which is which.

Maybe the wine will taste identically mediocre. Or maybe there will be a difference. And if there is, we won’t know which explanation to reach for: that you changed the wine, or your tongue. Or both.

Drinking cheap but real whiskey during the “Brother Verses Brother” meltdown scene, with Lara Louise & Brian Bell

We do this to our cities, our memories, our lovers, our enemies, our fathers, our mothers, our sons and daughters.

What story are you telling to the thing you’re about to drink?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Make it a good one, fucker.

Try the experiment. Then come tell me what happened here: