Warning: This blog includes spoilers of Rex Pickett’s book Sideways and Alexander Payne’s 2004 eponymous movie.

Disclaimer: All pictures and art in the blog have been explicitly shared and authorized by Rex Pickett, author of the book Sideways.

Sideways is the only, truly great wine movie out there. This, I suddenly found saying to myself one day after years of thumb-wearied browsing through the banal and yawn-inducing movie lists available on all the streaming platforms imaginable. Yes, the movie “Bottle Shock” based on a true event (The Judgment of Paris) "holds it wine" thanks to Alan Rickman’s imposing demeanor and that velvety, almost patronizing British accent that’ll make you believe anything, and despite Chris Pine’s outlandish and let’s just say it: ridiculously fake wig. The man would have been better off sporting roadkill on his head. Yes, it was watchable, but would I dine out on it? Would I watch it again? No and no. And alright the movie  “A Good Year” kept me going at first with its snappy pace and Russell Crowe’s category and oozing charm, but all this was ruined by the relentless clichéd rom-com nonsense which made for an unbelievably predictable plot. A single, handsome trader from the City of London ventures to French wine country after having inherited a vineyard from his late Grandfather…oh let me take a wild guess: He’s going to find out there are more things to life than money—bullseye. Oh, he stumbles upon a beautiful and opinionated French girl who plays hard-to-get- Oh, allow me to take a stab at it:  He’ll suddenly besotted by a woman he got to know for a grand total 5 minutes and decides to upend his by life by settling in French countryside whilst side-saddling and chortling….: Boom! Captain Obvious strikes again. As opposed to Bottle Shock, with “A Good Year” it was akin to finding myself trapped in an airplane and having nothing else to watch but a very-forgettable, “laid-back“ Adam Sandler movie-just something to anaesthetize my brain cells and bear the indignities of flying coach. And to add insult to injury with “A Good Year” I learned naught about wine, or the wine world for that matter-not even some hysterical Gallicism…rien de rien.  Are there other other wine-related movies you ask? There are quite a few filmic fiascos out there that’ll make the aforementioned two look like timeless masterpieces of the cinematic canon. I can’t even be bothered mentioning them in this blog because they’re really that unwatchable: utterly bereft of soul  and so cloying they’ll have you scheduling an appointment with your endocrinologist—you get the picture: they’re truly dreadful. As Bukowski’s would say: ‘They are all flat pancake Mommas with syrup spilled over their heads…with no original courage or definition…riding little waves of nothing. ’

So, which is your go-to movie when you’re both a lover of wine and art- just someone with half a brain? Where do you find refuge when you’re done being slapped in the face with yet another formulaic template? Where do you go snuggle your soul for a few hours when you seek to indulge in poetry, and depth, humor, solace and breezy jazz music?  Well my friends, the answer to that is undoubtedly the Oscar-winning film “Sideways”, a simple yet impactful story of two friends:  Miles Raymond, a Pinot Noir-lover and struggling writer and his buddy Jack Cole, a burnt-out, soon-to-be-wed voice actor, both heading out together on a road trip through the Californian wine country in a Saab convertible, no less. 

Miles and Jack have very different ideas and expectations for a trip that is meant to be Jack’s singlehood send-off. Miles is a an introverted, pensive and highly despondent man who’s weathering a severe case of a mid-life crisis. Jack, is an extrovert and a womanizer:  a non-discriminating thrill-seeker who I would almost call “Dionysian” if he at least had a moral compass. Think about that. You can say anything you like about  Dionysus, but at least he showed standards when betrothed the abandoned Ariadne and elevated her status to that of a Goddess. (’What a Chad’, the meme fiends of our Era Vulgaris would say.) Miles deeply disapproves of the way his friend conducts himself with women as Jack makes it clear from the start that his primary intention for this trip is to cheat on his fiancée. Miles then has no choice but to reprimand him and remind him of his better judgement, if he ever had one. Miles, on the other hand, is divorced and still licking his wounds. Though in the novel he comes off as more self-deprecating than in the movie, where he approaches his love interest, Maya, with cautious optimism, the truth is the character as a whole finds the process of trusting his feelings to other women, tedious and emotionally taxing. Who needs that aggravation right? As Miles in the movie tells his serial smitten friend in a diner upon the latter’s insistence on “carpe libido”:  It’s not worth it, you pay too big a price…it’s never free”.

“ They're contrasting… they're two sides of the male coin.
They're contrasting so it brings conflict, but conflict equals drama… equals comedy…equals resolution.     ”  

Similarly, the duo’s approach to wine contrasts starkly, serving as a parallel to their relationship to women. In the movie, Miles is a bummed-out middle school English teacher -something the author Rex Pickett dislikes because in the book Miles is not even that: he’s unemployed and hitting rock bottom, making his situation even more desperate than in the movie. Either way, none of these states of affairs are rosettes anyone will rush to pin onto their lapel- Miles is going through a rough patch and wine is all he has. Wine serves Miles as both an escape valve and an object of fixation for his repressed emotions. He’s  selective and discerning when it comes this, his fermented grape drink of choice . And when a certain wine meets his lofty standards, he waxes poetically about it and most often than not overindulges in it as well. For Miles, wine even becomes a crutch for his low self-esteem as he seizes every opportunity to pontificate about it, using his knowledge to elevate himself in the eyes of others.

Jack, as you may have surmised, show no interest in such things. He’s more than willing to imbibe just about any gut-rot he stumbles upon- he drinks for social and hedonistic purposes, willfully uninterested in the nuances and complexities of wine. It’s not that Jack is philistine, although in the movie he is portrayed to be be more so than in the book. He’s just happy to be brought along for the ride and drink to his heart’s content. Nothing wrong with that.  Jack sees wine for what he thinks it is: a means for drunkenness. “ They’re contrasting… they’re two sides of the male coin. They’re contrasting, so it brings conflict, but conflict equals drama…equals comedy…equals resolution”, Rex Pickett, the author of Sideways told me. That may very well be the key to the stories’ magic: the inevitable conflict sparked by the stark contrast in the main characters. It’s masterful use in both the book and the eponymous movie provides the necessary elements to jack up the tension and fuel the vehicle of narrative for miles.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the release of the movie Sideways, directed by the great Alexander Payne, I reached out to Rex Pickett, the author of the original book upon which the film was based- an interview via Zoom which he very kindly accepted. Contrary to what some may believe about the movie Sideways and in Rex’s own words : “ It was not the immaculate conception”. Sideways is Pickett’s brainchild. It was crafted in the 90s, a thankless decade that marked the nadir of the American writer’s career. “ Sideways has over 200 rejection letters from the publishing industry…it hurts… it really hurts man ! I laid my soul on the line….I dared to think my story was important enough”, Rex told me. Sideways is a deeply autobiographical and devastatingly honest novel, wrought in the economic hardships and family-related mishaps the author had endured. It was written at a moment Rex stared into the precipice of failure-the abyss of uncertainty. He would tell me later on in the interview that it was precisely not having a back-up plan that allowed him to write something so genuine. When you read his novel, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Sideways is personal, deeply personal, maybe too personal for certain people. “My ex-wife told me to burn it….. another  woman I just started to have a few dates with sat on my porch and said: “How can you be so personal?" And I said:  “I thought that was the definition of art, Anne….” Rex told me, with extraordinary ease- exposing the wounds that had healed with his subsequent success and the salve of time.

“ No criticism is above criticism itself. ”  

Rex wrote Sideways when all he could afford were free wine tastings at place called Epicurus located in Los Angeles. In fact, it’s precisely a tasting scene at Epicurus that opens the novel- a place crawling with rough-and-tumble drunks disguised as “wine connoisseurs”. So, Rex had that and golf, a sport he used both as an escape and a means for meditation, because, let’s face it,  there was next to nothing else to do as a struggling American writer. Rex finished writing Sideways in 2003, and despite his agent showing much interest in it, his wife at the time, red-penned through some of what would be the some famous scenes of the book and indeed the film. “ My ex wife had every page with an X through it and that scene is verbatim from the novel, writing ‘take out’ and my agent said, if you take it out, I'm not going out with your book! That's the one of the funniest scenes in the book. And so again, no criticism is above criticism itself… just because somebody says it doesn't make it so.” Rex told me. This cut deep for Rex not only because it came from someone so personally invested but also because his ex-wife was as an award-winning chairwoman from the NYU School of the Arts. It was weighted critique. It was only when Rex’s agent did manage to land the novel in the hands of no less than Alexander Payne, the man who had directed acclaimed films such as Citizen Ruth (1996), Election (1999) and About Schmidt (2002), that things started looking up. “‘You know what I loved so much about your novel, Rex? Your characters are so pathetic. I think he was kind of saying to me, ‘I challenge you to defy me because otherwise I'm not going to make your movie,’” Rex told me as he conducted a solitary sip-and-spit session in his kitchen. (“I don’t drink anymore,” he later clarified to me.) But despite Payne’s biting remark, Rex confessed that the director had invited him to attend and actively have a say in the shooting of the film, handing over the scripts and all the rest of it. In fact, had it not been for Rex Pickett’s intervention in the movie, what today is one of the most poignant scenes in cinema history ( Maya’s speech on wine) would have been scrapped.  “But you know, the famous story is Maya's speech, her famous speech on wine…that  was not in the first three drafts of the script it didn't exist I said ‘Alexander, she has to say something…otherwise she's a cipher.’ ’’Rex recounted.  And listen Alexander did. Thank God. But not everything in the movie was to Rex’s liking. In the movie Payne portrays Jack (played by Thomas Haden Church) as being as thick as two short planks. “In the movie if I were to be critical, I'd say Jack is a little bit of a one note sexual terminator … And in the play… he's not quite as dumb. Jack maybe hasn't seen all of Godard's films but he knows who Jean-Luc Godard is. So think about that…he’s based on a character a friend of mine, Roy Gibbons- he's not an intellectual, he is a ladies' man.” Rex explained. However, Rex did later say that as the filming progressed Payne gradually learned to understand the heart and soul of the the two main characters, primarily Miles, thanks to Paul Giamatti’s stellar interpretation of our maudlin Pinot Noir lover. What Rex really did not like, and still doesn’t is how Sandra Oh, an otherwise wonderful actress according to him ( I disagree) hogged the spotlight despite only appearing for a grand total of seven minutes on screen. “No, the film is written in first person from the point of view of Miles so that makes Stephanie (her name is really Tera in the book) a tertiary character… she's married to Alexander Payne…that's how she got the role…. she changed everything no one else changed anything…she gave herself a motorcycle in the book she drives a Jeep Cherokee… She gave herself a different name she gave herself a biracial kid. I mean, it makes Jack look pathetic,” Rex said.

But I wanted to dig deeper. I asked Rex about Carl Gustav Jung, not least because we both shared an admiration for the revolutionary Swiss psychologist, but because I had the inkling feeling that he had influenced the way Rex developed his characters in the book.  I was not wrong. Rex told me that he had begun delving into the works of Jung at the fresh age of 19. After having been compensated with money from a car crash settlement, of all things, he went to a local bookstore and bought the entire collection of Jung’s works, much to the surprise of the clerk himself. “I found myself going to bookstores 23 times a day-This was long before the Internet…just big black books… I was reading a lot and so one day I just went in and bought all 20 volumes! And the  shop person said, “Don't you want to just buy one or two and see if you like them?” I said “No I want the challenge of reading all of them…They're going to sit there and I'm going to face them on my bookshelf”….And he said “ Why don't you just take them out from the library ? ‘ No,’ I replied, ‘I need to own them… I need to own them…’ So I was out of school and I sat down and read for 6 hours every day for 6 months.” Rex recollected.  We would later go on to talk about Jung’s works on the collective unconscious , archetypes and the individuation process. It was when Rex said this that my initial hunch was confirmed: “ Again here we get to Jung. Jack is the extroverted feeling type …and Miles is the introverted thinking type. They are completely opposite!”. But Jung’s influence on Rex didn’t stop there-in fact it was Jung work’s that had inspired Rex to explore the concept of “The Journey.” Rex explained that Sideways is more of a “sojourn movie” than a road movie when compared to Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road, for instance,  a film that had had left a significant impression on him. Regardless of the miles covered, and as corny as I may be sounding right now,  Miles and Jack’s journey is undoubtedly an inner one. What each character learns about themselves, however, I will leave up to you- that’s your own journey within the sojourn. And Sideways could have been different Rex told me, it could have been a story about two friends doing Jello shots in Cabo ( his own words). “I like to believe that I gave of myself a certain truth that’s relatable to a lot of people,” Rex said. And it almost wasn’t-not the original movie itself, of course, but the Japanese rendition of it, something I just had to ask Rex about because I live in Japan and of course watched “Saidowaizu”. If you think my take on Bottle Shock and A Good Year was a wee bit much, don’t get me started with “Saidowaizu”. I wasn’t surprised to know that Rex shared my thoughts on the Nippon nightmare as I had done my homework and learned he had opined it had been “watered down” and “tepid” and that the only good thing about was that the check he received for it, cleared. “Watered down” and “tepid”. Rex is a gentleman, I have to say. Saidowaizu was an utter dumpster fire of a movie. You never really get to care for the characters who loaf around Napa whilst boring everyone to tears. Gosh-I wish they were two guys doing Jello shots in Cabo!- More like two salarymen doing sake shots in Enoshima or whatever. Saidowaizu is a straight-man-funny-man rendition of the original, more appropriate for Japanese stand-up comedy than anything else, I would think. Miles Raymond (Michio Saito) is a prudish, satchel-slinging screenwriter with less drive than a bumper car. The Japanese government should study his character, as I think I’ve identified the poster child for the nation’s plummeting birth rates.  Jack Cole (Daisuke Uehara) is a charmless, punch-drunk, knuckle-dragger that’ll have you rooting for a car crash that unfortunately for us viewers, never comes. Yeah, they abide by the traffic rules too. Don’t even get me started on the female characters- two Plain Janes on a beret binge who make a tax audit seem more engaging.  And all of this culminates in an insipid, bland and almost cowardly adaptation of the original. What a terrible day to have eyes. I told Rex, much to his surprise, that  Saidowaizu had done much better in the Japanese box office than the original- a great mystery to me at least- that, and why the Japanese are so into Peter Rabbit. Moving on.

I asked Rex about Chile, a country I love dearly and where Miles travels to in Rex’s third book of the Sideways series:  Sideways Chile. I must say it kind of blew the wind out of my sails to know that Rex was invited to come down to Chile by what he called “Crypto-Pinochet” supporters, not because I don’t believe him, but because I do. It was no surprise to me this people were owners of the mega wineries in Chile or whoever is responsible for that devilish plonk, straight from the devil’s bunghole: Casillero del Diablo. God help us. “ This isn't just about wine tasting you know…I had to find a damn story. I wrote sideways Chile a little bit with velvet handcuffs because I sense when I was down there in 12 and 13 I sensed that there was a revolution coming…Well, that revolution came and I was going to write you know:  Miles leading Mapuche Indians on Santiago… ‘No pesos no Pinot’ you know, that's what I wanted to write! A number of people who had sponsored me were Crypto-Pinochet loyalists. I couldn’t believe it…Forget the fact that Pinochet, murdered 5,000 to 10,000 people and there’s the disappeared people…I'm not a political person really, I mean, I'm a little left-wing as you can tell but you know, I start hearing this nonsense and I just thought ‘to hell with this’. The problem is when you take money,(I probably wouldn't have gone there otherwise) I had got to find a story. It was a job you know…But the problem is the people who game me the money “Wines of Chile” had a different idea of what that story should be. And so now you get into influence peddling and I had to go into the meetings and I said, ‘No, I’m going to be spending some time with MOVI (Independent Chilean Winemaker’s Movement) and if you don't like it, stop paying me and I'll fly out of town. I don't care ! ’ ’’ Rex recounted. But he did have good things to say about Chile and Chilean wine, namely the wonderful Sauvignon Blancs of Casa Marin, a winery located the Casablanca Valley, founded by the equally wonderful María Luz Marin. I also learned that Rex was not very keen on Carmenère, a grape he said no one could even pronounce (sorry Rex that’s just you Americans!) and what is today, Chile’s flagship grape. I do agree with Rex that the Chilean wine industry’s obsession with Carmenère is a bit like flogging a dead horse, and that the Bordeaux grape’s revival doesn’t even come close to the success Malbec had on the other side of the Andes. I also mentioned that it was ironic that Chilean Carmenère was thought to be Merlot for hundreds of years, until only very recently when a French ampelographer discovered that the Crypto-Pinochet wineries (probably) that had invited him over to evaluate their vineyards had been set up for the world’s most elaborate prank. Carmenère was thought to be Merlot, and Merlot was though to be False Merlot. Go figure.  Merlot as it happens is the grape that Miles maligns in the first Sideways book (and movie). The wine Gods do have a sense of humor, I though to myself-either that or Rex’s palate is quite consistent. Rex just smiled at my question, took another sip of wine and spat it in his kitchen sink as if he had been an Andean llama.

“It has two main male characters but 95 percent of all mysteries are read by women…so which women are going to want to read a thing about two guys who meet on a golf course ? The agents said it's just all about the marketing Rex…"

I then went on to ask Rex about his love-affair with Pinot Noir, something that was extrapolated to his author surrogate Miles. He explain that Pinot Noir is one of this very distinct wine grape varieties that leaves one speechless…struggling for words. I couldn’t agree more. Being that it was precisely a New World Pinot Noir that first got me interested in the wine world, I asked Rex about Chilean Pinot Noir. He, much to my disappointment, didn’t have many an accolade for Chilean Pinot, remarking that the monks in France had spent a millennium moving vines from here to there, finding the perfect spot and as Miles would say “coaxing it into its fullest expression”. I can take a hint: Chilean Pinot Noir growers were upstarts. Just because I was disappointed doesn’t mean Rex was not right-in fact he’s spot on. Having said that, there are wonderful beautiful examples out there that showcase of the potential of Chilean Pinot, and we here at GrapeFox are hellbent on proving it. Anyway, having asked him about Pinot Noir and knowing itmight have seemed like going for there low hanging fruit here, I couldn’t help but ask him about  the anti-hero, the anti-christ of grapes in the Sideways book:  Merlot.  “By the time I wrote Sideways,  Merlot was kind of tantamount to wine philistinism and as you probably know 60 minutes (a journalistic show) did a thing on the French paradox which was totally anecdotal… It wasn't based on any damn data and it concluded ‘Drink red wine and will avoid heart disease!’ And people raced to the liquor store to get red wine… they probably were given Cabernet…they didn't like it because they were cocktail or beer drinkers and they gravitated to this fruity red wine because they wanted to live longer ..Everyone’s looking for the fountain of youth…Thus was born the Merlot industry and 100% Merlot… Merlot is usually just a blending grape…. So by 1998, when I'm writing the book, you know, Merlot was 25% of the red wine market…just Merlot. People were drinking it because it was like vitamin E. In the 1980s everyone thought it's an antioxidant..thinking that if they drink it they’ll never get cancer and all this other nonsense…it’s all been debunked…If you said, ‘yeah I really like this Merlot’ these snobs would look at you like you didn't have any taste although we know there's some great ones in Bordeaux you know: Petrus , Rex reassured. He later concluded that Miles’ really only bashes Merlot because it sort of “got in the way” of his frustration of Jack cheating on his fiancée Babs ( “Christine” in the movie). Interestingly enough, he also said that because Pinot Noir is now being so overproduced in the U.S. ( partly due Sideways’ success) it’s become subject to the same misdeeds Merlot had endured.  My, my, how the barrels have rolled.

I went on to ask Rex about what is was the like to be a professional writer, with all its highs and lows, with all its satisfactions and vicissitudes. I told him that I saw him as a warrior, because I can’t truly fathom the guts it requires to stare at a blank screen: confronting yourself like that,.  I think must be one of the most terrifying things there is. Rex said: “So I think you have to do it because you really have an inner drive and a need…… what you're doing is what you're becoming… what you've done is what you've become and that's it. ” he said. On that note, I asked Rex about the scene in the movie where Miles calls Evelyn, his agent, to enquire about whether not his book struck a chord with the publishers at Conundrum. As you might already know, Miles’ book is rejected. Evelyn tells him that despite thinking it was a ‘fabulous book’ they couldn’t really figure out how to market it. It was a: ‘fabulous book with no home’. This struck me, and in fact moved me more than any other scene in the movie. I was surprised to know that the scene was in fact a recreation of situation Rex had gone through with La Prisma, a mystery novel he had written prior to Sideways. “That is a real conversation I had with a novel…La Prisma- I had written it before Sideways. It was a mystery novel and it had go a literary agent and that was huge because that literary agent was the one who got the book to Alexander Payne… despite what you might have read from other liars out there! I didn't know this:  It has two main male characters but 95 percent of all mysteries are read by women…so which women are going to want to read a thing about two guys who meet on a golf course ? They’re not going to want to read it! So the agents said it's just all about the marketing Rex… They love the novel but…I actually I heard those words that you heard in the movie. The book and the movie are more autobiographical than you think…even drinking from the spit bucket! I did that at high-end tasting…seriously… that was a real thing that happened…not at a winery but  a high-end tasting and I was dead broke and it was full of rich doctors and lawyers and I got there… it was basically a dump bucket and it was back in my drinking days you know… When the tasting was over I  said ‘What the hell? There's two bottles worth of wine in in there!’ So I drank from the bucket…. they laughed…they laughed so hard. And then every Saturday we have these tastings which opens the novel up at Epicurus…it was my only social outlet and they still laughed about it. I said, well, I gotta put that in a novel… in that particular case Miles is frustrated. I needed it for his level of frustration…I’m not trying to be arrogant or self-aggrandizing here but that moment, you know, the way he wrestles with the glass of wine with the guy then just drinks out of the spit bucket in utter frustration…it's actually a believable moment and yet it's an incredibly outrageous moment, ” Rex reassured.

We  moved on to all sorts of colorful topics: the cognitive erosion of the broader audience, Yukio Mishima, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Company, and even Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candles. Rex had only heard about HER jade eggs that you lodge up the vagina. I mentioned Paltrow ( who I think should just go ahead and get a degree in gynaecology already) because she was seen promoting Cameron Diaz’s  novel concept (or so she says) in winemaking which she brazenly dubbed: “clean wine”. The rationale here being that wine is the only product on the market that does not specify its nutritional values on the back label. I don’t know if you noticed the implication but if Prima Dumber here makes clean wines then the rest of the world winemakers make…yeah you guessed it:  “Dirty Wines”. You know in mathematics, it's the Law of Excluded of nobody cares Cameron, now please do the world a favor and jump off a bridge." Yes, Paltrow took the world by storm by telling the world that her wines included fermented grape juice and alcohol.Whipty-do. Anyway, my intention was not to waste time on bored Hollywood celebs who haven’t figured out what to do with their money. What I was really aiming for was to know whether or not Rex was a conservative when it came to wine. In other words I wanted get a better glimpse of his palate and opinion on all the inventive new categories of wines that are out there: natural wines, purples wines, wines aged in the depths of the seas, wines aged in outer space, cacao wines,  vagina-scented wines. Just kidding-scratch the last one, although Gwyneth if you ever read this, I’m telling you:  This idea would be a hit with your Pacific Rim nations… call me. I digress. “ That’s a good question” Rex said, for the first time in our interview. I have to admit: I was feeling good about myself at this point. A famous writer telling me I had asked a good question on my first interview now less ? Don’t I feel special ! ”( read in Phyllis’ voice from the movie.) “So on one hand, I'm not a conservative, and I'm not a luddite you know…I want to be open to those wines but I, just, I haven't been driven to them because the people who I trust and their taste  haven't told me that those wines are really that interesting…I'm interested in the really small producers and the ones who get in there with their hands and de-stem the grapes and pick out the ones that are unripe and the ones that are over ripe and just are doing it with gravity  and flow and that’s the person whose wines I’m interested in.  So you want to tell me about natural wines and you're going to put ingredients on the label and whatever no: what does the wine taste like? What does the wine taste like? I'm guessing a lot of these natural wines taste like shit. They don't have any complexity, any depth, any beauty…I don't mean to get on a rant here but the beauty and poetry of wine for me, unlike distillates, unlike beer which is where those natural wines are going in my opinion.” Rex explained. Rex and I also talked about how movies like Sideways wouldn’t have been so successful had nit been made today, they wouldn’t have had an audience, not with salami heads who watch reality TV and superhero movies all day. But unfortunately, that’s what sells, we both concluded, and the film industry certainly knows where its bread is buttered.  And if you think I was going to let Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine company off the hook, you’ve got another thing coming sunshine! This is what Rex had to say about how she incentivizes her readership : “We live in a world with Reese Witherspoon and her Hello Sunshine company… she sends you a book with some perfume and some roses in it or whatever. I mean, I want to send me a book with a live rattlesnake! I mean if she's keeping literature alive great… I mean at least at least Oprah picked Pulitzer Prize winners and stuff.  But ‘Hello Sunshine’, I mean:  Are you kidding me ? “. Well, there you go: we had inadvertently found the literary equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow.

I wanted to end my interview by telling Rex how much I appreciated him and his work. I also mentioned that Sideways, be it the book or the movie, had metamorphosed precisely into the deep, complex, haunting, and thrilling qualities that Miles uses to refer to Pinot Noir. If we ask Jung he may say that it was all a process of alchemy. Maybe Rex didn’t write a book as much as he made a fine wine as Sideways has certainly proved to stand the test of time.

Happy Anniversary Rex.

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