- Title: Leverage – The Corkscrew Job
- tv.com: link
After a woman’s father drops dead working at a local winery, the Leverage crew attempts to discover the secret behind a series of worker deaths the winery wants covered up and con a corrupt winery owner (Hart Bochner) out of his prized possession – a priceless bottle of wine once owned by Thomas Jefferson. While Eliot (Christian Kane) learns what he can working in the fields, Parker (Beth Riesgraf) goes undercover as an intern, Hardison (Aldis Hodge) goes in as a vintner, and Sophie (Gina Bellman) becomes the owner’s newest prized salesperson who works her magic to get the man to begin to doubt his own collection.
While Haridson identifies harmful chemicals the winery is using in the fields and tries to fake a 200+ year-old wine bottle, Nate (Timothy Hutton) comes up with a plan to make the owner’s lucrative wine collection appear completely worthless by turning himself into a rival wine connoisseur claiming he owns the prized Jefferson wine bottle. All Hardsion, Parker, and Sophie then have to do is make sure the winery owner’s bottle fails a series of test done by a wine auditor in front of their mark.
The near-impossible plan works like a charm, that is until their mark bribes the wine auditor and sabotages his own factory to kill a worker who has uncovered the truth and set out to find the evidence to prove it. The con is saved thanks to some late heroics by Eliot, Parker, and Hardison, and a final swerve that sends the winery owner to jail for selling a very real bottle of wine which he believes is anything but.
Does anyone know what winery they filmed this episode at, or was it an elaborate sound stage? Because, although they never showed anything that definitively showed what winery it really was, the details I saw looked remarkably like Viansa Vineyard in Sonoma. Of course, many wineries in California have a Spanish/Italian look, and being just a tourist on a wine tour I would not know how many have the same architecture, but the tile roof, tower, etc. reminded me very much of that winery. I much recommend Jacuzzi Winery in Sonoma over Viansa (the server that I spoke to during our wine tasting was VERY snobby; Jacuzzi caught on immediately that we were not wine officianados, and indeed had never been part of a wine tasting beyond cracking open a bottle of homemade Apple wine back in the day, and treated us as students interested in learning, not merely idiot tourists that they had to tolerate for a paycheck, unlike that server at Viansa), but it was one of 3 wineries we saw in our wine tour of Sonoma.