Thank you so much to everyone that joined us for our screening of 'The Sound of Music with Wine' at The Crescent Theatre on Sunday night. We hope you enjoyed the evening as much as we did!
Read on for details on all the wines from the evening, our gallery of photos, and a bunch of trivia.
As promised, these are the wines we enjoyed ...
Our Austrian Wines on the evening
Definition Gruner Veltliner, Majestic £11.99 (£8.99 mixed six deal)
Majestic's Definition range of wines taste like the wine is meant to taste so, in this case, a perfect introduction to Gruner Veltliner. Warm days and cool nights help create this fresh and aromatic wine, bursting with citrus, peach and white pepper .. delicious.
Winzer Krems, Orange Gruner Veltliner, Majestic £11.99 (£8.99 mixed six deal)
It's orange wine but it's got no oranges in it. White wine grape juice left sitting on the white grape skins is what makes an orange wine, orange. Just like how you make a rose wine, by leaving the juice on red skins to add colour to the clear juice. This orange Gruner was rich in ripe peach, cantaloupe melon and honey flavours, laced with a touch of spice. Great on it's own but even better with food.
Huber 'Taste the Difference' Riesling, Traisental, Niederosterreich, Sainsbury's £8.75
A little stilted on the nose but rich in texture with peach, apricot, crisp mineral freshness and a good long finish.
Weninger Blaufränkisch ‘Hochacker', Burgenland 2017 £20.00 ’17 Wine Freedom Digbeth
Bio dynamic producer, Weninger are famous for producing wonderful biodynamic Blaufränkisch. Weninger have been making wine in Burgenland, south of Vienna, since 1828.
Hochacker is the name of the single vineyard plot used for this wine, boasting 40 year old vines.
A medium bodied red wine, Blaufränkisch is the parent of Gamay and Zweigelt our next wine. It can be found in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia and Italy, known as the Pinot Noir of the East. A unique savoury gamey aroma gives way to sour cherries on the palate. This would be wonderful with mushrooms on toast with a drizzle of balsamic.
Von der Land Zweigelt, Majestic £11.99 (£8.99 mixed six deal)
Zweigelt of Rot Burger as it is also unfortunately named is a cross of two famous Austrian grapes; Blaufränkisch and St Laurent. You can expect to find this grape planted in Canada, New Zealand, Slovakia, Hungary and Washington State US.
Rich and juicy, bursting with red and black fruits with a hint of violet. Perfect with duck.
Gallery
Sound of Music Trivia
Some highlights from our movie trivia ...
The Sound of Music was based on a true story, but there were plenty of differences between Maria Kutschera's 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers and the film. For one thing, Maria was brought to the von Trapp home to care for one child who had scarlet fever and was too ill to walk to school, not all seven children.
The von Trapps did escape Austria as the Nazis came to power, but they didn't flee over the Alps, they got on a train to Italy and then traveled to America, where they had a concert tour scheduled. The day after they left, Hitler ordered the Austrian borders shut.
When they left Austria, Baron von Trapp and Maria had already been married for years and had two children of their own, with another on the way.
Maria kept the Trapp Family singers together with an iron will.
When the von Trapps came to America they settled in Stowe, Vermont. They opened the Trapp Family Lodge, which is operational to this day.
Maria sold the rights to her memoir to German producers who made two films. The Trapp Family and its sequel, The Trapp Family in America, were incredibly popular in post-War West Germany.
Halliday approached musical super-duo Rodgers and Hammerstein about writing one song for the show; they countered with making it a proper musical.
Because she'd sold the rights to the German producers, Maria and the von Trapps didn't see any money from The Sound of Music's success.
The musical's original title? The Singing Heart.
The Sound of Music was the eighth and final musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Hammerstein never saw the movie. He died of stomach cancer nine months after the Broadway premiere.
Audience members were totally convinced that "Edelweiss" was an actual Austrian folk song.
The Sound of Music opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959. Both major New York critics hated it, finding it way too saccharine, but producers already had $2 million in advance ticket sales so it didn’t really matter.
Even though two of the von Trapp children were boys, the entire children's cast was nominated in the Best Featured Actress category as a single nominee. They lost out to Mother Abbess, Patricia Neway.
When it came to the movie, Julie Andrews wasn't the first choice for Maria! Producers wanted Grace Kelly or Doris Day to replace her. Mary Poppins (for which Andrews would win an Oscar) hadn't hit screens yet and they didn't know if she had the star power to carry the feature film. (Day ruled herself out as "too American.")
Sean Connery, Richard Burton and Bing Crosby were in the running to play Captain von Trapp, before the role went to relative newcomer Christopher Plummer.
Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss also auditioned to be von Trapp children.
Kym Karath, who played little Gretl, was already a film vet when she auditioned for The Sound of Music. She was feeling so adult that for her audition she sang "Sixteen Going on Seventeen." She was five.
Christopher Plummer never cared for the movie. He thought it would compromise his reputation as a serious Shakespearean actor.
Plummer admitted he developed a crush on co-star Andrews when he saw her in My Fair Lady on Broadway, but called working with her like "being hit over the head with a big Valentine's Day card, every day."
While filming the iconic opening scene, twirling in the hills of Austria, Andrews kept getting knocked down in the mud by the gusts from the helicopter carrying the camera.
Charmian Carr slipped and fell through a window in the gazebo while filming "Sixteen Going on Seventeen." Her bandaged ankle had to be airbrushed out in later versions of the film.
When the boat carrying the von Trapp brood tipped over, Kym Karath, who played Gretl, nearly drowned because she couldn't swim. She swallowed a lot of water, which she then threw up all over co-star Heather Menzies, who played Louisa.
"Edelweiss" was so good that film director Robert Wise also thought it was a real Austrian folk song. When they were shooting the scene at the Salzburg music festival, filming was delayed for hours while hundreds of Austrian extras were taught the words. Also during that scene, Plummer was drunk.
If you look closely at the film, you'll spot the real Maria von Trapp in a cameo, walking past a stone archway while Julie Andrews sings "I Have Confidence."
In one of Maria von Trapp’s memoirs, she wrote that she wasn’t invited to the premiere of the film, and producers couldn't find her a seat when she asked.
One of Maria's biggest beefs with the film was with the geography. Not only does Salzburg not border on Switzerland, but taking that route out of Austria would have sent them straight towards Berchtesgaden, Hitler's summer retreat.
Maria von Trapp taught Julie Andrews how to yodel for real on The Julie Andrews Hour.
The Sound of Music won five Oscars in 1965, including Best Picture. It's one of only four films ever to win a Tony Award for Best Play or Musical, and later win Best Picture.
Adjusted for inflation, it's one of the highest grossing films ever made, right behind Gone With the Wind and Star Wars.
It had the longest first run in U.S. cinemas ever at four and a half years and played at Europe's largest cinema, the Gaumont in Birmingham for 165 weeks.
Charmian Carr, who played Liesl, went on to become an interior designer for celebrities, including Ernest Lehman and Michael Jackson.
Thank you!
We look forward to welcoming you back to another of our events very soon but why not check out our website or sign up to our monthly mailing list to find out about new events first:
Tony and the Wine Events Co Crew
Credit to IMDB and Broadway.Com for trivia taken from their '50 Fun Facts About The Sound of Music' article
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