Hello dear friends!
Today we are going to talk about a turning point in the history of winemaking. If you Google “The Judgment of Paris,” the most important and by far the most elaborate entry refers to an event recorded in Greek Mythology. Then if you Google “The Judgment of Paris and wine,” there is a whole different story in which Steven Spurrier is the main protagonist...
In May 1976, Steven Spurrier, an Englishman living in Paris for six years, ran a small wine shop - Les Caves de la Madeleine - in a passage on the rue Royal, together with his compatriot Patricia Gallagher. In addition, both had launched the Académie du Vin, the first private school in France dedicated to the world of wine.
That same year the bicentennial of the independence of the United States was celebrated, to which France had made considerable contribution, with Lafayette at the helm. Spurrier and Gallagher thought the occasion was an excellent opportunity to drive attention to their business. So they decided to organize a blind tasting between French wines and California wines.
Of course this implied a challenge, choosing the California wines. Neither Spurrier nor Gallagher knew much, to say nothing, about the wines that were made in California, beyond the fact that the few that reached Europe were very bad. In fact, no one in 1976 knew much about them. Not even in the United States itself, especially since the 'Prohibition' law - in force between 1919 and 1933 - ended the incipient wine industry at the end of the 19th century. Very few people knew that in the Sonoma and Napa valleys, there were a handful of true pioneers - many of Central European and Italian origin - who were determined to make quality wine (with France in the point of view and as a reference), with the invaluable help of the studies on viticulture and winemaking that had been developed at the University of California Davis, since 1935. Men with surnames such as Mondavi, Winarski, Gringich, Paschich or Tchelistcheff, second-generation immigrants, and who were sometimes true amateurs who had winemaking as a second occupation.
Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher traveled separately to the United States in the previous months, visiting the wineries and tasting the wines that some of them made from a list provided by Gallagher's sister, who lived in the US. Between the two they chose the sixteen wines - between Americans and French - that would meet in Paris, on May 24. All Californian wines were from wineries that had started their activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, in many cases the grapes with which they had been made had been bought from other winegrowers. For their part, among the French were some of the most revered wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Needless to say that the judges were some of the most prominent personalities in French gastronomy at the time. Steven Spurrier instructed the judges and told them that they would have to rate the wines under four criteria (sight, nose, mouth and harmony) and give each one a score of 0 to 20 points, which was a common criterion in France at that time. They started with the white wines and it was immediately apparent that the judges were utterly confused about the wines they were tasting, unable to distinguish whether they were French or Californian. No one expected that French wines couldn't win. Not just Spurrier himself, who had not organized the event as a real competition, but as a way to showcase some of the most interesting wines made on the other side of the Atlantic.
Finally the moment of the verdict came... Spurrier took his time and read the verdict slowly. The most valued wine had been the Californian Chateau Montelena from 1973, which obtained a total of 132 points, five and a half points behind the second, a French wine, the Mersault Charmes from the same year. Among the top four, there were three American wines and all the French judges - who were torn between astonishment and horror - had awarded the highest score to a US wine. Spurrier and Gallagher commented on the results, but did not give them much importance either. In the end, for them the whole event had turned out to be a failure since no French media had sent a journalist to cover it, so getting publicity was already out of the equation. The only journalist present was George Taber, a Time correspondent in Paris, who years later would write what to date is the only book on the events of May 24, 1976 in Paris.
London artist Gary Myatt has recreated the moment when the panel Spurrier had gathered in his Paris wine shop, most of whom were eminent French critics, discovered they had ranked Californian wines higher than French – a circumstance unthinkable in the mid-1970s.
After Time magazine -then distributed and read all over the world- published an 8-page article, the world discovered the 'unexpected truth'. In the United States not only was wine made, but also that it could compete with the best! The Judgment of Paris ended the myth of French supremacy and marked the beginning of the democratization of the world of wine.
Nowadays, one bottle of each of the winning wines is on display at the Museum of American History as part of the exhibit "101 Objects That Helped Build America."
And that's a wrap my friends! Hope to see you here in another 7 days. Cheers!
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