Uncorked: Netflix comedy about a BBQ-raised wannabe wine-expert is 'crisp, clean and sweet, like Drake'
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Smooth, with some earthy notes and a semi-sweet finish, the wine-themed Netflix comedy-drama, Uncorked, is about a reserved young man named Elijah (Mamoudou Athie) who is determined to pursue his love of wine.
Elijah has two jobs: One is with his domineering father, Louis (Courtney B. Vance), the proprieter of a second-generation Memphis barbecue and soul food take-out joint. The other is a part-time gig in a high-end wine shop, where Elijah drinks up knowledge from the sommelier owner.
Mamoudou Athie plays a young Memphis man who dreams of being a sommelier in Uncorked
Louis is, himself, a kind of connoisseur; he’s precise about the kinds and age of woods he buys to make barbecued ribs. But he has no interest in his son’s enthusiasm, insisting folk don’t care “what to drink with they chitlins.” When Elijah announces that he wants to be a master sommelier, his family keeps confusing the word with “Somalian” - “Is that like a pirate?” asks Louis.
Only Elijah’s boisterous affectionate mom, recent cancer survivor, Sylvia (Niecy Nash) sticks up for him. She chides Louis for squelching her son’s dreams: “You embarrassed Elijah at the dinner table. You gotta support him in the stuff he wanna do.”
The Memphis setting has several purposes: To show off an African-American cultural form of connoisseurship (barbeque), to allow some playfulness with the Southern Black dialect and to immerse the film with the down-tempo, fast-flow sounds of Memphis hip-hop. If that’s not what you usually associate with a movie about fine wine appreciation, that’s entirely intentional. Early on in the film, a young woman, Tanya (Sasha Compère) fresh from a bad break-up, comes into Elijah’s wine store with a friend, who advises her: “Your ass needs some wine.”
When she asks for advice, Elijah walks her through Wine 101 by comparing various rappers to white wines: Chardonnay is like Jay-Z “versatile smooth and kinda goes with anything”; Pinot Grigio is Kanye West, and Riesling is Drake, “crisp, clean and usually sweet.”
Tanya, who works as a hospital receptionist, becomes his girlfriend and pushes Elijah get out of his comfort zone and take that sommelier course. Soon after, he finds himself in a mostly white boy world, featuring the nerdy Richie (Gil Ozeri), and the entitled young man simply known as Harvard (Matt McGorry), who evolve from rivals to friends and study-mates.
In the movie’s most improbable sequence, for some reason, the entire wine class has a chance to study for a semester in Paris, which allows from some pretty touristic images at a cost to the movie’s momentum. The Parisian reverie is short-lived, derailed by a family crisis, and Elijah’s new third-act relationship with his father which, is predictable but not entirely so.
Uncorked has a laughs-and-lessons episodic TV flow, with bickering comic family scenes that switch suddenly to more somber moments. There are too many minor characters and, the wine-tasting scenes, which are supposed to be sound suspenseful, roll by like someone speed-reading labels and tasting notes.
What’s strong here, though, is the father-son dynamic, the credible friction and eventual rapprochement between between Athie, as the awkward aloof Elijah, and Vance, in a typically forceful performance as his domineering, but not insensitive father. The movie was written and directed by Prentice Penny a 45-year-old comedy writer (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Happy Endings, Scrubs), who is best-known as the showrunner for the sharply-written HBO Issa Rae series, Insecure, about a single black Los Angeles woman in her late twenties, negotiating the maze of race, career and romance.
Penny has also said it’s inspired by his own experience, as a TV writer who came from a family in the retail furniture business. Mostly, it’s sociologically timely. For the past decade or so, partly because of the ascendancy of hip-hop culture and the accompanying jump in sales for sweet-fizzy Moscato wines, there’s been a vigorous discussion about wine, status and the loaded language about race, gender and taste. (See Cameron Glover’s essay in VinePair, entitled Drinking While Black.).
To put Uncorked in wine terms, it’s not complex, but only a philistine would dismiss what’s easy and pleasing as flawed.
Uncorked. Starring: Bernard D. Jones, Courtney B. Vance, Daniel Johnson, Gil Ozeri, Hélène Cardona, Jennifer Pierce, Kelly Jenrette, Mamoudou Athie, Matt McGorry, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, Niecy Nash, Sasha Compère. Uncorked can be seen on Netflix.com