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Grape & pillage

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THOUSANDS OF WOMEN had never considered wearing leg warmers - those nasty, elasticated baggy socks that slip on over spandex aerobic pants - until they saw Fame in 1980. That was mere foreplay, however, compared to Flashdance's veritable celluloid leg-warmer orgy three years later. The same goes for Saturday Night Fever and its impact on disco, or Shirley Valentine and holidays in Greece.

Today's equivalent, however, is whipping up a storm of controversy.

Sideways - on general release in Hong Kong from today - is a film all about wine: the story of two friends who take off on a week's trip to the Californian wine country of Santa Barbara. The hero of the movie, Miles (played by Paul Giamatti) is a wine snob who hits the road with his friend Jack (Thomas Hayden Church), who plans to spend his last week of bachelorhood drinking and womanising.

There is concern surrounding the fact that what Flashdance did for superfluous sportswear, Sideways is doing for alcohol. 'Replace wine with heroin, and this movie would never have been made,' one outraged alcoholic support group in the US has been quoted as saying.

Miles is a fan of pinot noir - a delicate, complex grape whose unpredictability and genetic changeability has made many a winemaker grey with worry. In equal measure, Miles shows nothing but hostility to that commonplace crowd pleaser, merlot: at one point he threatens to refuse to attend a dinner if the offending tipple is to be served there.

Funny then, that vintners and wine stores in the US are now observing what is becoming known as the 'Sideways effect'. Pinot noir sales are up by a sizeable 16 per cent from the same period last year, according to an AC Nielsen report this week, with a whopping sales spike of 33 per cent in California. And despite Miles' anti-merlot tirades, what was previously the biggest-selling red in the US has enjoyed a three per cent sales boost.

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