The Judgment of Paris

Nine of France's most respected wine critics sat down to a blind tasting in Paris on May twenty-fourth, nineteen seventy-six. The wines were unlabeled. The judges could not see the bottles. They were there to rank California wines against the French, and no one in France was particularly worried about the outcome.

The California wines won both categories.

A nineteen seventy-three Chateau Montelena chardonnay, grown on the benchland just north of here in Calistoga, beat the white Burgundies. A nineteen seventy-three Stag's Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon from Napa beat the red Bordeaux. The judges had, unknowingly, ranked California above France in the two categories France considered its own. When the results were announced, at least one judge demanded her scorecard back. The story, as it has come down, is that she did not believe the results could be correct.

The French press barely covered the story. Time magazine did. Steven Spurrier, the British wine merchant who had organized the tasting, became famous in a country that largely dismissed what he had done.

What happened next was not subtle. Napa Valley land values tripled in the decade that followed. Money flooded in from outside the wine industry entirely, from corporate investors, from celebrities, from anyone who understood that the afternoon in Paris had redrawn the map of the global wine market. The modern Napa Valley, the one with the tasting-room architecture and the waiting lists and the three-hundred-dollar bottles, begins, in practice, on that single afternoon.

The winery you are near, Chateau Montelena, has been making wine on this land since eighteen eighty-two. The chardonnay that won in Paris was its second commercial vintage. The winemaker, Miljenko Grgich, a Croatian immigrant who had trained in Burgundy and worked at Beaulieu Vineyard and Robert Mondavi before landing at Montelena, did not learn he had won until weeks after the tasting. He had not been told it was happening.

The nineteen seventy-six tasting did not make California wine great. It made the world pay attention to something that had been quietly becoming great for a generation. That is a different thing, and the distinction matters: the valley did not begin on that afternoon. It was simply seen for the first time.