The Judgement of Paris, was the 1976 wine tasting that revolutionized the wine world.
Forty years ago, in the world of wine, there were just three categories: the good stuff (French), the very good stuff (also French), and everything else. On May 24, 1976—The Paris Tasting (which would come to be dubbed the mythical name “The Judgment of Paris”) was held with the expectation that French wines were superior to New World (i.e. American) wines.
American wines were only included to show interesting wines were being produced, but were not expected to outrank their French counterparts. No one could have expected a singular, notable event would revolutionize the world of wine.
A British wine seller and educator, Steven Spurrier, who owned a store in the center of Paris ,Caves de La Madeleine. After wandering by the original shop, the owner Madame Fougère was hesitant to sell it to the Englishman since it had been important to her late husband, so they struck a deal. Before she would sell, Spurrier spent six months working there without pay to prove his commitment.
Spurrier also decided to start a wine school for American and British expats living in Paris. Along with Jon Winroth, the Herald Tribune’s wine writer, the two opened the Académie du Vin, an English-language wine school. Business was good, so American freelance writer Patricia Gallagher also started working for the school and became the manager of Spurrier’s Paris store.
On her 1975 vacation , she traveled to the California wine valleys ,met vintners, sampled their wares and brought back a few samples of Napa Valley wines with her. Although Spurrier had tried some of the American wines available in Paris, he didn’t have access to the best California ones being produced. Inspired by her enthusiasm, he made a similar trip in 1976 and selected certain wines for a tasting the next month.
The timing was intended to coincide, more or less, with the bicentennial of the American revolution. Though that is “not an anniversary we Brits celebrate much” he said. They thought it would be fun to run a blind tasting including a few American wines around the time of the United States’ celebrations. Mostly hoping this would bring attention to his shop, they were also excited to show interesting things happening in American winemaking.
Spurrier only visited California wineries and made purchases to include, but didn’t tell the wineries he was planning on a blind tasting with the wines.
After purchasing two bottles of each wine for the blind tasting, he acquired 24 bottles of California wine on his trip, too many to take home as luggage. As a favor, the wines were actually brought to Paris as the luggage of a visiting tour group.
He selected six Chardonnays and six Cabernet Sauvignons.
In photo Spurrier
Spurrier tapped nine of the most respected names in French gastronomy for the job. They included sommeliers from the best French restaurants in Paris, the head of a highly regarded French vineyard, and Odette Kahn, the editor of the influential Revue du vin de France (The French Wine Review).
Then Spurrier enlisted judges who were the most prominent French wine experts of the day and had them taste ten white wines—six California chardonnays and four French white Burgundies. He also had them taste ten reds—six California cabernets and four French reds from Bordeaux. Although it shocked the judges, Napa Valley wines outranked the French wines in both the red and white wine categories.
They were a 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay and a cabernet sauvignon from 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Steven Spurrier was just as surprised as his French tasters, the judges tended to be tougher on the reds, and he thinks the Stag’s Leap cab won because they thought it was from Bordeaux. As it happened,George Taber a writer from Time magazine, was covering the event and did a story on it, making the California coup international news.
Patricia Gallagher (from left), who first proposed the tasting; wine merchant Steven Spurrier; and influential French wine editor Odette Kahn.
After the results were announced, Kahn is said to have unsuccessfully demanded her scorecard back.
“She wanted to make sure that the world didn’t know what her scores were,” says George Taber, the only journalist present that day.
Miljenko (Mike) Grgich made the chardonnay while working for Chateau Montelena winery.
(The grapes for the winning Chardonnay were purchased. As a new winery, Chateau Montelena was in the process of growing new vines that wouldn’t produce harvestable fruit for several more years.
Most of these grapes were actually grown in Sonoma County, although the wine was made at Chateau Montelena in Calistoga. )
Now in his mid-90s, Grgich, who grew up in a wine-making family on the Dalmatian coast of what was then Yugoslavia and brought his family traditions to the Napa Valley, was happy to hear of his wine’s victory, but not entirely surprised.
His Chateau Montelena chardonnay had already beaten three famous white Burgundies the year before in a blind tasting in San Diego.
But his pleasure was intense.
He said when he got a phone call telling him the New York Times was sending reporters and a photographer to interview him about Paris, “I started dancing around the winery and singing in Croation that I was born again.” Mike Grgich came to wine more-or-less genetically.
Warren Winiarski, born in 1928, took a far more circuitous route.
Though his father had made dandelion wine at home (legally) during Prohibition, wine had not been part of his life in the beer and hard liquor America of his youth.
When he spent a year in Italy researching a thesis on Machiavelli as a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago, he first encountered wine as an everyday mealtime beverage.
Then, back in Chicago, he had what might be considered a spiritual awakening, when, as he drank a New York State vintage, he says the “wine revealed itself to me.”
Winiarski calls that “an Athena moment.” With his new appreciation of what wine could be, he and his wife decided to move to California, where he served “voluntary indentured servitude” to learn how to turn grapes into gratification.
Eventually, they bought a prune orchard and converted it into their first vineyard in what became Stag’s Leap district of southern Napa Valley.
“Prunes didn’t lend themselves to making great beverages,” he said as he sat in his splendid hilltop house, with a sweeping view of the original vineyards and of the high rock outcropping that is the actual Stag’s Leap.
Like a writer of short stories, Winiarski talks about a wine having “a beginning, a middle, and an end,” about “how the mind processes what is being tasted,” and of his having “a responsibility to the fruit” when making a vintage.
The effects of the Judgment of Paris were varied and pronounced.
Many in France were annoyed,to say the least. Not surprisingly, one writer claiming that everyone knew French wines were superior “in principle.”
But Winiarski contends that the tasting caused the French to “wake up from taking things for granted.”
Though Napa pioneers such as Robert Mondavi had already developed methods for producing fine wines, the Paris tasting shifted attention to California, and gave other vintners there encouragement to create some of the best wines in the world.
Both Winiarski and Grgich went on to further triumphs. In 1977, the first vintage from Grgich Hills beat 221 other chardonnays from around the world, including France. Grgich said “The 1973 was very good, but I always think we can do better.”, but Warren Winiarski, waving a hand over the rows of vines spreading out below his windows, bright green with their spring leaves, said, “For us, the Paris tasting was a Copernican revolution. We never looked at our wines the same way again.”
His vineyards have had many proud moments, and have produced many renowned vintages, but Winiarski counts as a high point a certain evening in the San Francisco Harbor, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan celebrated their anniversary with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip aboard the royal yacht Britannia and were served a Stag’s Leap 1974 Cabernet.
Bottles of these two triumphant vintages are now held in the Smithsonian collections at the National Museum of American History.
Before the Paris tasting, there were approximately 67 wineries in the Napa Valley. Today there are over 400.
The Judgment of Paris forever changed the California wine trade.
And it wasn’t just California that was transformed. The results “gave winemakers everywhere a reason to believe that they too could take on the greatest wines in the world,” White says.In the aftermath of the tasting, new vineyards bloomed around the U.S. (think Oregon, Washington and Virginia) and the world — from Argentina to Australia.
The Judgment of Paris prompted the world’s winemakers to start sharing and comparing in a way they hadn’t done before, says Warren Winiarski, as a result, he said at a recent Smithsonian event in honor of that long-ago tasting, “the wines of the world are better, the wines of France are better.”
Which means the world’s wine lovers were the real winners that day.
Feature photo
Gary Myatt’s painting The Judgement of Paris at owner Sir Peter Michael’s the Vineyard hotel, located in Berkshire near Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey was filmed