Wine in The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day is a great movie set in England during World War II. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Mr. Stevens, a loyal butler to an English noble. Emma Thompson is Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. James Fox plays Lord Darlington, who has a giant house, lots of money, and a tendency to support the Germans.

There's a lot of wine in this movie! You see during the many dinner scenes that wine is served both from a decanter and from a bottle. It would all depend on the wine they were pouring, if it needed decanting or not. Another consideration woudl be if the wine was special enough that you wanted to show off the label.

You'll note especially that this third decanter below (which he just poured into Christopher Reeve's glass) is very wide. This allows a lot of surface area to interact with the wine, so the wine breathes well.

In this next image, the butler is very precisely measuring exactly how far each wine glass is from the edge of the table. Placement of items on a table had to be perfect.

They're planning for a special event, so they bring in cases of Graham port. I love port! So do the English :)

Here comes the classic scene. Mr. Stevens is very upset. He goes down and lets himself into the locked wine cellar. He takes out a dusty bottle of Dow 1913 vintage port. Then he accidentially drops the bottle on the stairs, breaking it! It's the only time he shows emotion during the whole movie - his frustration and anguish on the bottle breaking (and of course it's releasing his pent up emotions up to this point).

The signs on the wall indicate that there's also a lot of madeira in the cellar, another tasty fortified wine!

Wine in Movies, TV Shows and Books