Bill Pullman, left, and Chris Pine play father and son in Bottle Shock.

The first thing you should know about the oddly titled Bottle Shock is that it’s about fathers and sons, the destruction of preconceived notions, and wine … lots and lots of wine.

Bottle Shock is awash in wine and, more specifically, revolves around a competition between French and Californian wines that was held outside Paris in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial.

The French had long declared their wines to be superior to anything grown anywhere else in the world. The contest was organized by a rather pompous Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris and had a wine school that he augustly called Le Academie du Vin (the Academy of Wine). It involved a blind taste test conducted by a group of snobby French oenophiles. It was supposed to settle the matter once and for all, and put those upstart Americans in their place.

Fortunately, Bottle Shock is not as dry as all that sounds. Its charming final 20 minutes are buoyant and elevating. Writer-director Randall Miller (with script credits also going to Miller’s wife, Jody Savin, and to Ross Schwartz) creates tension during the contest, even though one probably has guessed the outcome, and ties up some loose ends about the central subplot involving the friction between a father and son.

But Miller, who directed numerous episodes of the TV series thirtysomething and Northern Exposure, takes a leisurely time getting to the heart of his story, even though there are some funny bumps along the way. Many of the lighter moments are pulled off by Alan Rickman, who often has played the embodiment of evil (Die Hard) to mysteriousness (a running role in the Harry Potter films). In Bottle Shock, Rickman steals the picture as Steven Spurrier (a real-life figure, as are most of the characters in this “based on a true story” movie).

In real life, Spurrier appreciated California wines, but in the film he is a nose-in-the-air wine merchant who longs to be taken seriously by the stuffy French wine aficionados whose camaraderie he covets.

To do so, he concocts the international competition, with the help of an expatriate American wine lover living in Paris (Dennis Farina), flying to the Napa Valley to check on the local output and coming away surprised by what his taste buds find bottled there.

The Californians are bemused by this pretentious Brit, and play little tricks on him, although most are eager to put up their wine against anything the French have to offer.

All this is the background for the film’s less interesting focus, which revolves around the testy relationship between Bill Pullman’s financially struggling vintner, Jim Barrett, and his scruffy wayward son, Bo (Chris Pine), who returns from a hippie sojourn to work in the vineyard. Things do not go down easily between them. Bo has some new ideas about the business, which the stubborn, by-the-books Jim resists. When push comes to shove, their tiffs are settled in an outdoor boxing ring.

Bo’s head is turned by the arrival of the pretty Sam Clayton (Rachael Taylor), who has been hired as an intern in the vineyard to learn wine-making. But things become a triangle and then some after Jim’s right-hand man, Gustavo Brambila (Freddy Rodriguez), begins falling for Sam. Bo feels betrayed; Jim feels betrayed, too, after discovering that Gustavo has been secretly making his own wine, which may be entered in the French competition.

There’s a lot of back and forth and up and down as these subplots collide, finally settling down to getting that contest underway, thanks to an ingenious solution to the problem of transporting the California wine to France so it doesn’t get “bottle shock.” That’s the term used for wine that has been jostled during long trips; it can take weeks for the wine to recover. There’s also a nice resolution to the conflict between Jim and Bo.

Best of all, however, is the gorgeous flyover vistas that we see of the hilly Napa Valley grape-growing region. It gives the film a classy look, like a good bottle of wine.

***Bottle Shock

Starring: Bill Pullman, Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Freddy Rodriguez, Rachael Taylor, Dennis Farina, Miguel Sandoval, Eliza Dushku.

Rated: PG-13, contains profanity, adult themes, drug use.

mjanuson@projo.com