News

It's not your typical reality TV exchange.

"What's the term for adding sugar to wine during fermentation?" demands a stern-faced woman, peering librarian-like over her reading glasses.

"We just need an answer," insists the man seated next to her at a table in a dimly lit cellar.

The camera cuts to a college-age blonde standing nervously at attention in front of them.

"I'm drawing a blank," she offers.

Viewers, too, can be forgiven for drawing a blank, unless, of course, they happen to be Burgundy or Chinon aficionados.

The Wine Makers is a new television series based in California that promises to add suspense, humiliation and betrayal to wine education. Call it The Apprentice with grapes. Or, more specifically, The Apprentice with grapes and brains.

"It's a thinking man's reality show, for sure," says Kevin Whelan, founder of Doc City Productions, which has offices in New York and California. "If you tune in, you're going to learn about something. You're going to learn a lot about wine."

The six-part series, due to finish filming in April and scheduled to air in early summer on PBS in the United States and on a yet-to-be-named commercial network in Canada, borrows the standard reality TV conceit, pitting 12 contestants in a faceoff of skill and will. The challenge? To harvest, crush and blend the wine and develop a marketing strategy for their cuvée. Competitions range from the gladiatorial, such as orchestrating a complete harvest in 48 hours, to the cerebral, devising an eye-catching label and brand identity.

Prize for the last wine geek standing: a contract to make and market the winning brand across the United States. Also part of the package is a five-city tasting tour, during which the winner gets to pour samples for the public, and an editorial profile in a major food and wine magazine.

A U.S. steakhouse chain has already contracted to carry the victory vino by the glass at locations across the country. "There's already been orders on their wine, so it puts them in business," Mr. Whelan said. "We have totally short-cut what would have taken them years to do."

But is wine ready for prime time? Even Mr. Whelan, who worked on Eco-Challenge with reality TV pioneer Mark Burnett (Mr. Burnett developed The Apprentice and produced Survivor), concedes the series is destined for a narrow audience by Apprentice standards.

Perhaps most significantly, it lacks, for better or worse, the celebrity magnetism and captivating comb-over of skyscraper tycoon Donald Trump. Judges for The Wine Makers include such lesser knowns as Lettie Teague, author and wine editor of New York-based Food & Wine magazine, and Joshua Wesson, co-founder of the U.S. wine store chain Best Cellars.

But the fact any network, even highfalutin PBS, bought the series at all is, I think, an encouraging sign of the times. As a professional pursuit and pastime, wine finally is breaking out of the dinner-party-bore ghetto and earning mainstream interest.

"People think they would love to give up their day job up to become winemakers," Mr. Whelan said.

Doc City received between 3,500 and 4,000 applications in response to a casting call two years ago, he said. "It literally shut our server down. We were definitely not prepared."

Ultimately, 600 candidates were brought in for auditions. "They all had to be wine enthusiasts," he said. "These are the people among your friends that everybody goes to when they need to ask something about wine." To qualify, they also had to have business smarts but could not be working for a winery or enrolled in a viticulture or oenology program.

One cast member, known only as Viral, a high-tech worker in San Jose, Calif., helped clinch his spot by declaring his intention to open a winery in his native India. "He sees the burgeoning middle class in India who are aspiring to all those things that the middle class aspire to, and he sees tremendous growth potential," Mr. Whelan said.

He says the most surprising liquid produced on the set so far has not been wine but tears. "We had a lot of people who cried," he said, chuckling at the unexpected shows of emotion. "There were some times when people asked for us to stop shooting because they were crying. That's one thing we weren't expecting. They really want this, I suppose."

The tug of halcyon vineyard life is the hook Mr. Whelan had been seeking for some time. As a wine aficionado, he had produced several wine-related educational series for PBS, including Wine 101 with David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame, Tales from the Vineyard and Uncorked with Ted Allen from Queer Eye.

"They were all just how-to wine shows, and with each one of those, we tried to get other networks interested and we couldn't. But, quite frankly, I just didn't want to do another one of those shows. How many times can you explain to someone what malolactic fermentation is?"

The surge in wine appreciation during the past two decades has sparked collateral interest not in the finer details of fermentation, but in the good life that goes with knowing how to produce the stuff, Mr. Whelan said. "What people know about wine now has made them hungry to know more, but they really want to know about the lifestyle."

For many people, notably cabernet-quaffing city slickers hankering for a simpler existence, that lifestyle is likely to hold more appeal than a chance to become The Donald's professional whipping boy (The Apprentice), the wife of a gym-bunny narcissist (The Bachelor) or a stress-case graduate of that other foodie reality series, Hell's Kitchen, starring the foul-mouthed British toque of terror, Gordon Ramsay.

Certainly, that's what The Wine Makers' sponsors, including Napa Valley's Beringer Vineyards, are hoping. "We're sponsoring it because I think it's going to reach a specific audience," said Barry Sheridan, the California winery's vice-president of marketing. "It's worth it to experiment a bit."

For The Wine Makers to succeed, it will have to do more than pose oblique skill-testing questions about the technical term for adding sugar to fermentation vats, however. (The answer, by the way, is chaptalization.) It must overcome a problem that has plagued every one of its nap-inducing predecessors. Wine, let's face it, is dull as dishwater, video-wise. When it comes to making the stuff, what isn't slow-paced farming tends to take place at an even slower pace in dimly lit cellars. And when it comes to serving the stuff, is there anything less video-genic than a sommelier reminding us that Chablis goes with oysters?

Contrast that with cooking shows, loaded as they are with seductive food play and audible sizzle. It's no surprise that in 15 years of the Food Network, beverage shows have pretty much been a bust (with the notable exception of The Thirsty Traveler, starring charismatic Canadian Kevin Brauch, who never met a vat of grapes he didn't feel the urge to stomp).

"It's really difficult to get wine programming on the air," Mr. Whelan allowed. "But if people see this series, they will realize it's not 'white wine goes with fish.' "