Let it be known that I love movies at least as much as I love wine, and Francis Ford Copolla is my idol. He has directed some of the greatest commercial movies of all time — The Godfather I and II, Apocalypse Now — as well as some of my very favorite, less commercial features, like Rumble Fish, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Youth Without Youth.

I confess it was only after the tasting yesterday that I dived deeper into COPOLLA lore to find a deeply intriguing story of the great man’s relationship with wine. Suffice to say that Francis Ford Copolla has been increasingly engaged with California wines since the 1970s, when he and his wife Eleanor bought the lands surrounding the legendary Inglenook vineyards in Rutherford. Now although Francis Ford Coppola Winery has merged with the Delicato group (3rd largest exporter of US Wines), Mr Copolla sits on the board of Delicato and reportedly has a strong influence on the group’s decisions.

Sergio Valente came through again with huge production value for a media lunch at the W Hotel in Taipei. Simone Margheri was over from Hong Kong to introduce the new offerings against a panorama from the 31st floor. The wines we tasted are all reasonably priced considering their source and pedigree, but it was easy to see that with these offerings, COPOLLA, Delicato and Sergio Valente is aiming at a mid-tier market, with price points far below what we must expect to pay for cult wines from Napa.

Frankly speaking, I liked the least expensive one best, the Diamond Chardonnay, but all of them are very much in the contemporary style from Sonoma and environs — moderate alcohol and ripeness, satisfying freshness and minimal oak. The Chardonnay was big and complex without being overly creamy from MLF or bruised by too much time in French Oak. I shared a bottle with a group of TWA students last night, and we all found it worked well, even with pretty spicy food, the fruit-forward profile holding up, even against flower pepper.

But here I want to explain about the name, DIRECTOR’s CUT, because at our tasting yesterday it seemed I was the only one who fully understood the meaning of this phrase and its references. It’s a great name for a wine, alluding of course to the great film director whose name is on the label, but in relation to film it has even more significance.

Director’s Cut refers to the version of a film created by the Director and Editors, a draft if you will, as opposed to the Studio Cut, which is what audiences see in theaters. Film studios often reserve the right to re-edit films before they are released to the public, taking over the project and revising the film to make it (in their view) more commercially viable. Directors are sometimes extremely unhappy with these ‘studio cuts’, but can’t do much about the practice if they want to get a film released. In the production contract they cede control of the final edit, unless they are proven profit makers, famous enough already to force their will on the initial contract.

By putting the name Director’s Cut on his medium-tier wines, Francis Ford Copolla reiterates the connection to his famous name, the fame of his movies, and his legendary bravery and independence on the boundary between commercial compliance and artistic freedom. He also adds a zoetrope strip.

A Zoetrope is “a 19th-century optical toy consisting of a cylinder with a series of pictures on the inner surface that, when viewed through slits with the cylinder rotating, give an impression of continuous motion?. (Dictionary.com)

It also happens that ‘American Zoetrope’ is the name of Copolla’s film production company, so we see multiple efforts to leverage Francis Ford Copolla’s movie-making celebrity to add value to his wines.

What’s in the glass?

At almost the same prices as Director’s Cut Cabernet Sauvignan from Alexander Valley we tasted the Copolla Diamond Claret, a very drinkable bordeaux-style blend with plenty of California fruit and perhaps a touch too much French Oak, but I’m sure that it will soften out in a year or two and retain it’s luscious core of black fruit. The Claret is my choice to drink in 2025.

A note about the Diamond name and the diamond shape on these bottles. Simone said that against the advice of everyone at Delicato, Copolla insisted the Claret bottles be wrapped in gold mesh (like Marques de Riscal?), and I see why: The diamond shape is vertical, and if you look at Copolla’s Napa cult wine from Inglenook, it’s called Rubicon, and the logo is a horizontal diamond shape with the names Niebaum and Copolla around a serif intermingling of N and C… These labels are almost anti-marketing of Copolla’s movie brand, perceptible only to people who inquire more closely, certainly not visible on the wine-shop shelf. The including of Niebaum refers not to a living partner (correct me if I’m wrong about that point) but to the founder of Ingelnook Estate Winery back in 1848, when it soon became the most technologically advanced wine producer in California and continued to flourish until prohibition. It seems to me that with such gestures Francis Ford Copolla still expresses deep respect and deference for the pioneer champions of California wine.

The new line also has many more such references, not the least is naming his Sonoma Red Eleanor, after his wife. They met in 1975 and have been together ever since. And so finally we see that family comes first for Francis Ford Copolla. His career and all his business strategies point to this central them, just as for Michael Corleone the family was everything…

PS — I just learned that the Copollas have changed the name of the Inglenook winery again, this time to Rubicon Estate Winery, after their flagship red, so the brand tinkering continues, but the wines are still second to none.