The New York Times explores the Sideways Effect — the stampede of people rushing to Santa Barbara’s wine country after seeing the film starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church.

For Santa Barbara County, removed by hundreds of miles and thousands of exalting words from far more celebrated wine regions like the Napa Valley, the “Sideways” effect has been profound. Unlike Napa, where multimillion-dollar wineries and top restaurants have helped generate a vast tourism industry, Santa Barbara County has been an overlooked and often ignored part of the California wine business. Now it is the wine region of the moment, with the film functioning as a feature–length product placement vehicle.

Tourism has boomed, particularly in the Santa Ynez Valley, where most of the action takes place, about 40 miles north of Santa Barbara. The county has distributed almost 40,000 copies of a “Sideways” map, detailing the wineries, restaurants, motels and other sites that appear in the film. It has printed a pamphlet, “The ‘Sideways’ Guide to Wine and Life,” which is on sale countywide.

Sideways the movie is based on the novel of the same name by Los Angeles writer Rex Pickett. Much of the story is autobiographical. Fifteen publishers rejected Pickett’s manuscript before St. Martin’s Griffin bought it.

In the mid-1990s, Rex Pickett considered himself a failure: a never-published novelist, depressed, penniless and miserably divorced, who used an interest in wine to mask what was really, if we’re being honest about it, a drinking problem. And so, with nothing left to lose, he wrote Sideways, a novel about a never-published author, depressed, divorced, and drinking too much, who takes his closest friend - a hopeless womaniser who’s about to get married - on a pre-wedding wine tour that almost ends in catastrophe. Most of that really happened, too. The main difference is that Miles, the central character in Sideways, never does get his book published. Whereas Sideways itself was made into a film, released in the UK last weekend, critically adored, and has now been nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. “It has changed my life a little bit,” Pickett says, with a hint of sardonic understatement. “I drive a car now that, when you get in it, it smells like it’s going to start.”

Read more of Pickett’s interview in the Guardian.