In contemporary parlance, perhaps we should refer to it as
5/24.
That’s the calendar date the wine industry, especially in France
and California, changed forever.
In contemporary parlance, perhaps we should refer to it as 5/24.
That’s the calendar date the wine industry, especially in France and California, changed forever.
Thirty years ago – May 24, 1976 – California wines shook the hidebound French wine industry to its racines when they took top honors at a hastily arranged blind tasting in Paris.
Had Le Monde published a story about the event that day at the Intercontinental Hotel, held to coincide with the U.S. bicentennial, the headline might have read, as it did on Sept. 13, 2001: “Nous sommes tous Americains” (We are all Americans).
It wasn’t supposed to come out that way. The organizer, a maverick English wine merchant named Steve Spurrier, said later, “I thought I had it rigged for the French wines to win.” One of the American reds, a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, came from vines just three years old. Surely it would be no competition for 1970 vintages from the ancient vines of Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château Haut-Brion or Château Montrose.
The stage was set, with the crème de la crème of French wine tasters prepared to pass judgment.
Yet the Stag’s Leap bested all three.
Among the whites things went even worse for the French. Californian Chardonnays took four of the top five slots, headed by a 1973 Chateau Montelena. A Monterey County wine, Chalone, came in fourth, three places better than a much ballyhooed 1973 Bâtard-Montrachet.
It was the oenological equivalent of the Miracle on Ice.
The French would rather have kept the results quiet, but Spurrier had invited a Time Magazine writer. George Taber’s story lit a fuse, and French wine authorities retaliated by banning Spurrier from their tour for a year.
May 24 catapulted the California wine industry into the upper echelons of prestige. Ronn Wiegand, a leading American authority on fine wines, said, “The French monopoly was crushed permanently.” Suddenly California distributors had people knocking on their doors instead of the other way around.
Ten years later, the French were still licking their wounds.
In Paris’ tony 16th arrondissement, in a cul de sac at the end of the rue des Eaux called Place Charles Dickens, are the 14th century cellars of the former Abbey of Passy. Carved into the rock at the bottom of a bluff overlooking the Seine, today they house the Paris Wine Museum.
In 1986, the museum was only two years old, not yet on the standard tour, and trying to publicize itself. One September day, the museum sponsored a tasting event, the cool, vaulted caves were jammed with French wine lovers.
A few months earlier in New York a rematch had been staged on the 10-year anniversary of the famous tasting, and once again California wines had come out on top. When it came time to give his speech, the master of ceremonies sounded like a coach in the locker room at halftime giving his team a pep talk, unaware perhaps that a spy from the other team had wandered in.
He heaped praise on the venerable French wine industry, and an equal measure of scorn on others – especially those poseur Californians. The crowd nodded approvingly. Everyone who mattered knew which was superior, he sniffed gallicly, as if 5/24 had been an aberration.
The Judgment of Paris, as Taber called it, did more than put California wines on the map – it also accelerated the transformation of American drinking habits. U.S. wine sales, unadjusted for inflation, have increased almost seven-fold since, with California wine still comprising over 82 percent of the volume despite increased competition from other states.
In California the change has been particularly profound. The Wine Institutes estimates the economic impact of the industry on the California economy at over $45 billion – a third of that coming from the retail value of the wine alone. In 2005 some 15 million tourists spent $1.3 billion on wine-related vacations in the state.
A reenactment called “The tasting that changed the world” will be staged May 24 simultaneously at COPIA, the Napa Wine institute, where Taber will sign his just-released book, “The Judgment of Paris,” and at Berry Bros. and Rudd in London. Many restaurants around the country are planning celebratory dinners.
If any events are planned in France they must be low-key affairs; none turned up in a Google search. Perhaps the French are still having difficulty coming to terms with history, but in the end, they cannot argue with “in vino veritas.”
