Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Praise forJudgment of Paris

  “A vigorous account of the dare that made connoisseurs think differently about California wines. An intoxicating indulgence forSideways fans, and an education for would-be wine sophisticates.”

  —Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

  “A vivid, robust story that goes down smoothly.”

  —Clarissa Cruz and Paul Katz,Entertainment Weekly

  “Taber has fashioned an entertaining, informative book…. This is a serious business book, too, sure to be required reading for American vintners and oenophiles.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] sprightly and definitive account.”

  —Jerry Adler,Newsweek

  “Detailed, evocative.”

  —Peter M. Gianotti,Newsday

  “Here’s the inside tale of the dramatic tasting session that transformed the wine industry. George Taber was the only reporter there, and he tells the tale with the same authority, depth, and clarity as the American wines that won. His tale has fascinating characters, great locales, and a fine bouquet.”

  —Walter Isaacson, author ofBenjamin Franklin

  “Although the topic may seem narrow,Judgment of Paris focuses a wide lens on the world of wine, and the results are intoxicating.”

  —T. J. Foderaro,The Newark Star-Ledger

  “[George Taber] has written an engrossing book that puts the Paris Tasting into good historical context…. Even readers who know about the Paris Tasting will find plenty that’s new inJudgment of Paris . And those who have only a vague idea about the event will get an important lesson in a watershed event for California wine.”

  —Laurie Daniel,San Jose Mercury News

  “George Taber was alone among journalists to attend the wine world’s Declaration of Independence from French supremacy. He tells the story of the California wine revolution with verve showing how the upstarts managed to surprise the complacent French. This is a rare book about wine to be sipped, not gulped.”

  —William Echikson, author ofNoble Rot

  “Taber uses the Paris Tasting as a container for a delicious mix of Old and New World winemaking techniques, the economics and politics of wine, and an overview of worldwide wines…beautifully rendered…. It seems a shame to use a bent cliché to sum up such a well-written and cliché-free book, butJudgment of Parisbelongs on the shelf of any wine lover worth his/her Grand Cru.”

  —Bob Fishburn,The Roanoke Times (Virginia)

  “You don’t have to dislike the French to enjoy this book, but it doesn’t hurt.Judgment of Paris recalls how, in 1976, American underdogs bit the big poodle where it really hurt—in the wine culture, where France had been top dog since the Middle Ages…. It’s a great tale, well told.”

  —Ralph Peters,New York Post

  “Half the fun of appreciating wine is drinking in the history…. [George Taber] puts the impact of [the 1976 tasting] into perspective, offering a prehistory of things to come with globalization and corporate influences in today’s wine industry.”

  —Gil Kulers,The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “This book gets my highest recommendation for its engrossing storytelling of a tale that needs telling.”

  —Charles Olken,Marin Independent Journal (Marin, California)

  “Taber recounts the story of that memorable day in a clear, well-written, and fascinating style.”

  —Dave Buchanan,Monterey County Herald (California)

  “For those of us who were lucky enough to be part of the fun at Steven Spurrier’s wine shop in Paris, this book is a trip down memory lane. For everyone else, Taber brings the event to life brilliantly with insightful portraits and a reporter’s eye for telling detail.”

  —Don and Petie Kladstrup, authors ofWine & War

  “Nearly thirty years later, Taber’s book outlines an historic event that is relevant, captivating, and compelling—even for non–wine aficionados. The petty wine war that the Paris Tasting set off had one big winner: good wine. And one big loser: good wine…from France.”

  —Christian Vannequé, Vannequé Publishing, Judge at the 1976 Paris Tasting

  “Judgment of Parisis a fascinating recounting of that historic event that was like a lightning rod to the budding wine scene in California. It is a must-read for anyone interested in wine.”

  —Daniel Johnnes, Wine Director, Montrachet, and President, Daniel Johnnes Wines

  “Spirited, intelligent, and a deliciously entertaining good read. Essential for anyone who has ever enjoyed a good bottle of California wine.”

  —Anthony Dias Blue, Executive Director of the San Francisco International Wine Competition

  “I devouredJudgment of Paris and it is dazzling—reads like a thriller, with the added benefit that the scholarship is impeccable too!”

  —Orley Ashenfelter, the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Publisher ofLiquid Assets: The International Guide to Fine Wines

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Text copyright © 2005 by George M. Taber

  Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Nigel Holmes

  Photograph of Mike Grgich copyright © Lindy Lindquist

  Photographs courtesy of Jim Barrett, Steven and Bella Spurrier, and Warren Winiarski

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNERand design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Taber, George M.

  Judgment of Paris : California vs. France and the historic 1976 tasting that revolutionized wine / George M. Taber.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Wine tasting—France—Paris—History—20th century. 2. Wine industry—France—History—20th century. 3. Wine industry—California—History—20th century. 4. Wine and wine making—France—History—20th century. 5. Wine and wine making—California—History—20th century. I. Title.

  TP548.5.A5T23 2005

  641.2′2′094436109047—dc22

  2005044146

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-4789-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4789-1

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Contents

  Forewordby Robert G. Mondavi

  Prologue

  Part One:

  A Driving Dream

  Chapter 1. The Little Wine Shop in Cité Berryer

  Chapter 2. France Ruled the World

  Chapter 3. The New Eden

  Part Two:

  The Awakening

  Chapter 4. California Dreamer

  Chapter 5. Starting Over in America

  Chapter 6. A Revolution Begins

  Chapter 7. The Swashbuckling Wine Years

  Chapter 8. In Search of a Simpler Life

  Chapter 9. An Apprentice Winemaker

  Chapter 10. The Rise of Robert Mondavi

  Chapter 11. Launching a New Winery

  Chapter 12. A Case of Industrial-Strength Burnout

  Chapter 13. The Rebirth of a Ghost Winery

  Chapter 14. Making the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon

  Chapter 15. Making the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay

  Part Three:

  The Judgment of Paris

  Chapter 16. Voyages of Discovery

  Chapter 17. California Wines at the Tasting

  Chapter 18. French Wines at the Tasting

  Chapter 19. A Stunning Upset

  Part Four:r />
  The New World of Wine

  Chapter 20. The Buzz Heard Round the World

  Chapter 21. A Dream Fulfilled

  Chapter 22. The Globalization of Wine

  Chapter 23. Dispatches from the International Wine Trade

  Chapter 24. France Revisited

  Chapter 25. Napa Valley Revisited

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Scorecard for the Judgment of Paris

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Reading / Tasting Group Guide

  Foreword by Robert G. Mondavi

  It was one hundred years ago that my father came to the United States and began to make wine here. And it was just nearly thirty years ago that the Judgment of Paris took place. I like to think about the advances we made over the two generations until that tasting took place and about the progress we’ve made since.

  I always knew we had the soil, the climate, and the grape varieties to make wines in the Napa Valley that could rank with the great wines of the world. When we started, we did not have the knowledge of how to accomplish our goals, but I knew we had to begin.

  It was my pleasure to have worked with Mike Grgich and Warren Winiarski, who are the real heroes of this book. They were certainly more adept than I, but I like to think that they grasped my vision of what could be done in the Napa Valley, and I know we worked and planned and dreamed together that a day like that bicentennial event in 1976 could occur.

  It was also a pleasure to meet Steven Spurrier and later his associate Patricia Gallagher here at the winery. Believe me…there were not a great number of believers in those days and we prized every one. In London we had a few people who knew what we were doing—Hugh Johnson, Michael Broadbent, and Harry Waugh—but until Steven we had no one in France. It was a real treat to go to Cité Berryer and see California wines for sale at the Caves de la Madeleine!

  I’m certainly happy to see that George Taber—who was there—decided to write the true story of the momentous event. So much of California wine history has been lost, and as he points out, the dramatic tasting sent shock waves all around the world. Although our wines were not in the tasting, it appeared at the time that we gained quite as much as our colleagues. It truly was a victory for our Napa Valley wines, California wines, and in fact, winemaking in North America. It gave us the confidence to continue what we were doing—confidence in our commitment to excel.

  This is a book for every wine lover; it has a history and a very exciting story well told. And we won!

  Prologue

  Author, at left, at the Paris Tasting

  Was there ever a better job? In the mid-1970s, I was a correspondent forTime magazine in Paris. It was a small office, so I got to write stories on subjects as varied as French politics andhaute couture. When a big story broke in one of the countries under the Paris bureau, I jetted off to Madrid to cover the assassination of a Spanish prime minister, to Lisbon to report on a revolution taking place, or to Amsterdam to check into a bribery scandal involving the Dutch queen’s husband.

  On May 24, 1976, I happened to be in Paris. The previous week I had suggested to editors in New York a story on a wine tasting that was doing the unthinkable: comparing some of the greatest names in French wines with new and little-known California wines. It seemed like a nonevent—clearly France would win—but as a native Californian, I had developed an interest in wine and had tried to learn something about European wines while studying or working in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and, of course, France.

  Each weekTime correspondents around the world suggest hundreds of stories. Only a few of the proposals are scheduled and even fewer ever make it to press. It’s a fierce survival-of-the-fittest process, but the result is a lively, compelling publication. Although my story was scheduled, I knew that the odds of it getting into the magazine were long. If, as expected, the French wines won, there would be no story. But you never know, and a wine tasting—where maybe I’d get a chance to try a few of the wines myself—seemed, at the very least, like a perfectly wonderful way to spend an otherwise slow afternoon.

  The event was taking place at the InterContinental Hotel, not far from theTime office just off the Champs-Élysées. In winter I might have taken the Métro there, but it was a beautiful spring day, so instead I walked through the immaculate gardens lining the grand boulevard toward the Place de la Concorde. I considered this the most beautiful part of the world’s most beautiful city. There were monumental buildings, elegant people, and an exciting hustle and bustle. This was the epicenter of the city Gershwin put to music inAn American in Paris . I strolled past the American embassy and the Egyptian obelisk nicknamed Cleopatra’s Needle in the Place de La Concorde to the Rue de Rivoli, and then under its arcades lined with fashionable shops displaying their wares. The InterContinental, located on the Rue de Castiglione and bordered by the Rue de Rivoli and the majestic Place Vendôme, was one of the most fashionable hotels in Paris. It reeked of class and luxury.

  A hotel doorman directed me to the small, elegant room off the hotel’s patio bar where the tasting was to take place. As I entered, waiters in tuxedos were busily setting up the event, laying out tablecloths and distributing glasses. I knew the organizers of the tasting, Englishman Steven Spurrier, who owned a nearby wine shop called the Caves de la Madeleine, and his sidekick Patricia Gallagher, an American. I had taken an introductory wine course taught by Gallagher at the Académie du Vin, a wine school associated with the shop. Her personal plea was one of the reasons I had agreed to cover the tasting, which was designed to garner some publicity for the shop and school, but they were having a hard time getting any publications to take it seriously. In fact, I was the only journalist who showed up. After saying hello to Gallagher, I started taking notes in the brown plastic-covered book that I always carried with me.

  Soon the nine judges began arriving. I knew none of them personally, but they had impeccable credentials and were among the leading wine experts in France. With the quiet formalism of the French establishment, the judges greeted each other with a handshake and then took their places along the long bank of tables. As this was going to be a blind tasting, meaning the labels of the wines would not be shown, the judges would not know which wines they were tasting. They knew only that the wines were from France and California, and that the red wines were Bordeaux-style Cabernet Sauvignons and the whites were Burgundy-style Chardonnays. Shortly after 3:00 p.m., a waiter began walking up and down a row of tables pouring wine from unmarked bottles. The judges had nothing in front of them except a scorecard, two glasses, and apetit pain, a small hard roll for nibbling on to clean the palate between wines. As is common in a wine tasting, the judges started with the white wines.

  It was a very informal event, so I was free to roam around the room as the judges tasted the wines. They were a little chattier than is normal at a tasting, where the experts usually quietly concentrate on the work at hand.

  About halfway through the white wine part of the competition, I began to notice something quite shocking. I had a list of the wines and realized that the judges were getting confused! They were identifying a French wine as a California one and vice versa. Judges at one end of the tables were insisting that a particular wine was French, while those at the other were saying it was from California.

  Raymond Oliver, the owner and chef of the Grand Véfour restaurant in Paris, one of the temples of Frenchhaute cuisine, swirled a white wine in his glass, held it up to the light to examine the pale straw color, smelled it, and then tasted it. After a pause he said, “Ah, back to France!” I checked my list of wines twice to be sure, but Oliver had in fact just tasted a 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay from California’s Napa Valley! Soon after, Claude Dubois-Millot of GaultMillau, a publisher of French food and wine books and magazines, tasted another white wine and said with great confidence, “That is definitely California. It has no nose.” But the wine was really a 1973 Bâtard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, one
of Burgundy’s finest products.

  Spurrier’s Paris tasting might just be an interesting story after all.

  Part One

  A Driving Dream

  We could in the United States make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly of the same kind, but doubtless as good.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON,1808

  Chapter One

  The Little Wine Shop in Cité Berryer

  If we sip the wine, we find dreams

  coming upon us out of the imminent night.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  On an autumn day in 1970, two Englishmen were walking around Paris’s posh Right Bank near the Rue Royale. Although its glory was in the nineteenth century, luxury still reigns there as an art form in this section made up of the city’s First and Eightharrondissements . The area combines New York City’s Park Avenue with Beverly Hills’s Rodeo Drive. Within a few blocks are found such restaurants as Maxim’s, shops like Hermès and Cartier, and the Ritz, the quintessential ritzy hotel. The Right Bank is a wonderful area for strolling, especially in the fall after most of the tourists have left and the city’s pace slows a little. The summer heat is gone, and the chestnut leaves begin to fall.

  The two men wandered into Cité Berryer, a street easy to miss because it was only a block long, going from the Rue Royale to the Boissy d’Anglas. Cité Berryer was a slightly seedy shopping arcade that seemed out of place amid all the luxury around it. Built in the nineteenth century, it was named after a then leading, but now long forgotten, politician. Twice a week an open-air, fresh vegetable and fruit market took place there, and fashionable and unfashionable women alike lined up to buy produce for their families. A small wine shop was located next to a locksmith.

  As the two men passed the Caves de la Madeleine, a wine shop named after the famous church located two blocks away, one man turned to the other and said, “That is exactly the kind of shop I would like to buy.”

  Steven Spurrier was a well-to-do son of English landed gentry, who at the age of twenty-nine was still trying to figure out what he was going to do when he grew up. After spending several months living in Provence in southern France, Spurrier had recently moved to Paris, where he and his wife, Bella, resided on a 130-foot barge moored on the River Seine at the Place de la Concorde.