Film

Sour Grapes

Name: Sour Grapes
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2016
Cast: Rudy Kurniawan, Corie Brown, Laurent Ponsot, Jason Hernandez, Jerome H. Mooney

A brisk, gleeful true-crime documentary about Rudy Kurniawan, the mystery man who talked his way to the top of the fine-wine world by pouring counterfeit bottles worth millions for oenophiles too proud to admit they couldn't tell the difference. It's less about wine than about vanity, expertise, and how easily both can be flattered into blindness. Funny, twisty, and oddly cosy for a story about fraud.

TMDb rating

7.3

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Another documentary that starts as one story and swerves into something darker and stranger, with the same pleasure of watching a jaw-drop reveal land in real time.

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Catch Me If You Can2002

Spielberg's slick, charming take on a real-life con man who talked his way into rooms he had no business being in, exactly like Rudy did with wine.

But It romanticises its con artist more than Sour Grapes ever does — this one wants you rooting for the liar.

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Same era, same appetite for excess-as-armour — if you want the financial-crisis backdrop of Sour Grapes blown up to three hours of gleeful, grotesque spectacle.

But It's exhausting by design, and the wine doc's tighter, wittier control might make this feel bloated by comparison.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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A documentary about a different kind of audacious performance — a man walking a wire between the Twin Towers — told with the same forensic, suspenseful joy in unpacking how someone pulled off the impossible.

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Bottle Shock2008no page yet

A breezier, fictionalised look at the wine world's snobbery and blind spots, set around the 1976 Judgment of Paris that upended it.

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Dirty Money2018

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Same structural con as Kurniawan's — an outsider who studies the tastes and insecurities of an elite world well enough to be waved through its front door.

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It takes the same mechanics of forgery and deception and strips away every trace of fun, forcing the question Sour Grapes only teases: what do we forgive a fraud for, and why?

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