Wine

The Paris Tasting

Napa Valley makes only four percent of the wine produced throughout California, but the quality of that wine has made California wines famous throughout the world. The Napa Valley itself is only one-eighth the size of France's Bordeaux region, but that hasn't kept its wines from besting the finest of France in prestigious wine tastings.

The most famous was the event that truly put the Napa Valley on the map. On May 24, 1976, in celebration of the American Bicentennial, a well-known British wine merchant named Stephen Spurrier conducted a blind tasting to see how well American wines held up against the most famous of the French wines. The tasting was held in Paris and was judged by a panel of nine highly respected French wine experts. The French wines included several Grand Cru Bordeaux and first-rate white Burgundies.

Although the bottles were covered, the judges knew that they were tasting both American and French wines and, indeed, some judges made comments during the tasting about how obvious it was which wines were American and how inferior they thought those wines were.

When the results of the tasting were announced, many of the judges were horrified at what they had done. A few judges even tried to retrieve their tasting notes. The top red wine, surpassing the finest of French wine estates, was a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley winemaker Warren Winiarski and his Stag's Leap Wine Cellars. Winiarski's Cabernet edged out such highly-regarded entries as a 1970 Mouton Rothschild and a 1970 Chateau Haut Brion.

The top white wine, in an equally horrifying result for the French judges, was also from the Napa Valley. It was a 1973 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena, made by winemaker Miljenko (Mike) Grgich (now co-owner of Grgich-Hills Cellars). In fact, six of the eleven highest rated wines were from California.

The wine world was stunned, the French were despondent, the Californians ecstatic. Napa Valley wines had truly arrived on the world scene.

Buy Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine by George Taber.

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