Adapted from the infamous James Ellroy book and set in Los Angeles in the early 1940s, Black Dahlia is a modern film noir gem directed by Brian De Palma, whose list of classics includes Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables.
Based on the true unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, an attractive B-movie starlet found dead and horribly mutilated, this dark and methodic film is part thriller, part mystery, and a peek inside a Los Angeles police department filled with greed and corruption.
The main characters include Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson), a ravishing high-society woman who has a close relationship with hunky Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhardt) and Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), a couple of LAPD officers who have teamed up to search for the killer.
Black Dahlia also features symbolic drinking scenes with glasses of dark red wines shared by the three main characters as they dine together. In the 1940s, the plantings of fashionable grape varieties such as pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, and syrah were still in their infancy. So instead, most of the red wines of that era were made with zinfandel, an illustrious black grape that has a unique ability to get more fruit intensity the longer the vines are in the ground.
An excellent modern-day example is the Carol Shelton 2002 Monga Zinfandel, Cucamonga ($24*), a sophisticated yet powerful red wine made with intensive fruit from vines planted in 1918 at the Jose Lopez Vineyard near the Ontario Airport in San Bernardino County, an area just outside of Los Angeles that is now surrounded by 10 freeways.
Today, the yield from this certified organic vineyard is just a half ton per acre and no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides are used. But with these grapes, Carol Shelton (a.k.a. "The Queen of Zinfandel") is able to handcraft a deep, dark and robust style wine featuring bold flavors of raspberry jam, red currants, dark chocolate, Allspice, cumin, white pepper, and a nice touch of oak which adds a hint of allure to each sip. Glamorous, intriguing and mysterious much like the movie, this wine gets more complex the deeper you go.
* Prices quoted in U.S. dollars
