The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Sour Grapes" (South Pacific Pictures, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 7) at 10 I watched the intriguing second episode of the New Zealand-set and -made detective series, The Brokenwood Mysteries. This was made in 2014 and was almost inevitably called “Sour Grapes,” since it dealt with the annual Brokenwood wine festival and competition. The lead detectives are Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland) and a third sidekick introduced in this episode, Sam Breen (Nic Sampson), a tall, striking-looking redhead who mostly does legwork for the other two cops. The plot kicks off with the murder of Paul Winterston (Alistair Browning), out-of-town judge who was brought in to award the prize to the winner of the wine contest. His body is found in an open fermentation vat full of raw red wine after he was pushed under with a giant stirring paddle and held there until he drowned. The prime suspect is Amanda James (Jo Davidson), whose winery had won the contest for the last five years in a row but this time has lost to a brand called “Bright Valley,” owned by Julian Bright (Peter Elliott). Bright hosts a nationwide radio program about wine in addition to making the stuff himself. Amanda was counting on her sixth victory in a row to win a contract with a major supermarket chain to sell her wines, and among the people who don’t like her is her own father, Ned James (Geoff Snell). Ned has dropped out of the wine business and just makes private stock for himself and his friends, and he tells Shepherd that what he doesn’t like about Amanda’s approach to wine-making is she’s taken all the heart out of it and made it too scientific. The evidence seems to build up against Amanda, especially when Shepherd learns that she had a brief affair with Winterston even though she tries to lie her way out of it – at several points she tells him, “I don’t like sex” (throughout the show the characters turn short “e”’s in the middle of words into long ones – “sex” becomes “seex,” “dead” becomes “deed” and, as it did in the first episode, “detective” becomes “duh-TEEK-tive” – which I presume is a peculiarity of either the New Zealand accent in general or the particular dialect of this mostly rural part of it).

Though she’s still considered a suspect, Shepherd relies on Amanda’s expertise to analyze the wine samples and determine just how her primo product became so contaminated Winterston and the other judges literally turned up their noses at it – or at least spat it out as soon as they drank it – because it was so terrible. Amanda’s chemical analysis of the bad batch of her wine indicates that the contaminant was urine (presumably human), which the killer used to spike her wine. He actually stole two cases of her wine, one of which he spiked with urine (and then carefully replaced the seals on the bottles with new ones, though one of the key giveaways between the contaminated bottles and the good ones was that the insides of the seals didn’t exactly match in color) and one of which he kept pure but used to refill his own Bright Valley bottles, so Amanda really won the contest prize after all since the winning wine came from her vineyard. The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Julian Bright, who murdered not only Paul Winterston (who figured out Julian’s plot and tried to blackmail him) but also a rival local vintner named Rob Visnic (Jeff Szusterman), who figured out the plot and tried to expose it but also got drowned in a vat of raw red wine. Thanks to Amanda’s analyses of the wine samples found inside the corpses, Shepherd deduces that they were both killed in the same place – in Julian’s vineyard in vats of fermenting merlot – even though Paul’s body was found at Amanda’s operation in a vat of pinot noir because Julian had moved it to frame Amanda. (One wonders just how he handled the literal “dead weight” of a corpse.) Ultimately Shepherd and Sims confront Julian with the evidence, though Julian insists on recording the conversation with the threat that he’ll play the tape on his radio show to bolster his Trump-like claim that he’s being framed by authorities who want to drive him out of business. Eventually he gets captured, though he puts up a major struggle and it takes the brute strength of Shepherd and Sims combined to subdue him.

There are a few glitches in this one, directed by Josh Frizell from a script by Tim Balme, notably the fact that in the wine-tasting scene that opens the show there are no plain crackers at the testing stations. In fact, there are usually plain crackers at wine-tasting events so the people doing the testing can eat something to get the taste of the last wine sample out of their mouths and freshen their palates for the next batch. Also I missed the clever use of American country music in the first episode, “Blood and Water,” both to illustrate Shepherd’s own musical taste and his thoughtlessness in blasting away with it whether the other people in his car like it or not. But “Sour Grapes” is ultimately an engaging TV episode even though its debt to British crime shows in general and Midsomer Murders in particular (especially the use of an annual contest no one in the dramatis personae seem to have ever heard of before as the setting and the multiple murders, though the writers of Midsomer Murders generally don’t make us wait as long between the first murder and the second as Tim Balme did here) is pretty obvious, and I missed the character from “Blood and Water” of the woman police supervisor who’s also one of Mike Shepherd’s three or four ex-wives, since he’s such a womanizer even he can’t remember how many times he’s been married before. Instead there was a young character who basically functions as Shepherd’s “wine whisperer,” Jared Morehu (Pana Hema-Taylor), a Maori (I’m presuming) who explains to him just how to sample wine properly but doesn’t seem to have any other function in the plot.