Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  If there was a centerpiece to Spurrier’s wandering life, it was wine. In his youth, when other boys were outside playing soccer, he could be found rearranging bottles in the wine cellar at Holbrook Hall, his family’s estate in Derbyshire in north-central England. Spurrier worked for a short time for two leading shops in the London wine trade. One of them sent him—at his own expense—on a seven-month study tour of wine through France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal.

  As Spurrier and his friend, a British lawyer living in Paris, entered the store, the owner, Madame Fougères, asked if she could help them.

  “My friend here would like to buy your shop,” said the lawyer with British directness.

  The idea was not so crazy. The wine shop had actually been quietly for sale for two years, after the owner’s husband had committed suicide. His widow had lost interest in running the business, which involved lots of heavy work lifting cases and pushing around barrels of wine. After a few minutes of conversation, the two Englishmen left.

  A few days later, Spurrier returned alone to talk to Madame Fougères about buying the shop. She explained that she had a strong emotional tie to the store because it had been her husband’s pride—in fact, his whole life. She was not certain if she would sell it, especially to an Englishman who didn’t speak much French, despite his proclaimed interest in her country’s most prestigious product. Madame Fougères told Spurrier she doubted he could “carry the torch” for her dead husband. Spurrier then made a proposal. To show he was serious, he would work for her in the store for six months at no pay, doing whatever she asked. It was a deal she could hardly refuse.

  So even though he had $250,000 in inheritance money in the bank, Spurrier went to work rolling wine barrels around the store’s cellar and delivering cases of wine up six flights in the service stairway of Parisian apartments because delivery people were not supposed to use the elevator. Sometimes a grateful housekeeper gave him a fifty-centimes (ten-cent) tip.

  Spurrier learned the Paris wine business from the inside at the same time he was improving his French. When the six months were over, he bought the wine shop for 300,000 francs ($50,000), and on April 1, 1971, moved behind the cash register to be the new owner. Madame Fougères had been very formal up to that point, never even telling him her first name. But after he bought the business, she asked him to call her by her nickname, Timoune.

  The Caves de la Madeleine was a typical French wine shop. Its core business was inexpensivevin ordinaire, the wine an average French family drinks with lunch and dinner. Madame Fougères bottled it out of tanks, selling four simple wines by the liter: a red with 11 percent alcohol, a 12 percent red, a white, and a rosé. The day he took over, Spurrier stopped the bottling ofvin ordinaire, though it took him a year to sell it all off. Madame Fougères’s wholesaler told Spurrier he was crazy and would soon go bankrupt.

  Thevin ordinaire crowd, however, was not what Spurrier was going after. He wanted the upper part of the market and was soon visiting vineyards all over France to buy quality wines directly from winemakers. He thought his biggest potential market was the Britons and Americans working in Paris, especially in the neighborhood around his shop. The British and U.S. embassies were only a few blocks away, and in the nearby Place Vendôme and Place de la Concorde, IBM and American law firms had offices. As the only wine-store owner in Paris who was a native English speaker, Spurrier wanted to be the wine merchant to that large and generally affluent Anglo-American community. The way to reach them, Spurrier concluded, was through theInternational Herald Tribune, the daily newspaper of Americans in Paris, which provided a diet ofNew York Times andWashington Post stories plus a few local articles. Spurrier began running ads in the paper’s classified section for the Caves de la Madeleine’s promotional events.

  Given his upper-class background, Spurrier moved easily in Parisian business and social circles. He cut a dashing figure, wearing three-piece suits and with a glass of wine never far away. His hair was stylishly long, cut in an early Beatles style, and he sported a free-flowing mustache. His slight British upper-class stammer and terribly British style charmed journalists, especially women. In a profile published in theHerald Tribune, reporter Susan Heller Anderson gushingly wrote: “A peach-colored Englishman elegant in teal blue pinstriped suit with waistcoat and creamy linen shirt, he describes in Etonian accents how most Provençal rosés are absolutely filthy.”

  Jon Winroth was theHerald Tribune ’s wine writer, and soon after taking over ownership of the wine shop Spurrier set out to meet him. Winroth had grown up in Chicago, where his father was a professor of archaeology. In a rarity of the 1940s and 1950s, Winroth’s family served wine regularly with meals. He had come to Paris in 1956 on a Fulbright scholarship to study history, but wine was soon his major interest. He landed a job with theHerald Tribune, writing stories on topics like the year’s harvest or some interesting French winery.

  Spurrier sent Winroth samples of special wines he was carrying, always enclosing an invitation to stop by the store or give him a call. For months Spurrier heard nothing in reply, so one day he walked the short distance to theHerald Tribune offices on the Rue de Berri. When he arrived, Spurrier got into one of those tiny Paris elevators that can hold two people as long as neither person breathes. Ever so slowly it rose to the third floor. Just as Spurrier was leaving the elevator, a thin young man, also with a mustache, was getting in.

  “Can you tell me where Jon Winroth works?” Spurrier asked.

  “I’m Jon Winroth,” the man replied.

  “I’m Steven Spurrier. I own the Caves de la Madeleine wine shop.”

  “So you’re the guy who’s been bombarding me with all those samples! I’m heading out to have a glass of wine. Why don’t you come along, and we can talk?”

  The two men hit it off immediately, talking for more than four hours over several glasses of wine at a table in the back of a nearby café. Spurrier told Winroth about the plans for his business. Sales were good; he was becoming better known and progressing toward his goal of becoming the wine merchant for Anglo-Americans in Paris.

  Spurrier also told him about how a small but regular group of Americans came by the shop late in the afternoon after work to talk about wine. He often opened a bottle of wine and gave them some basic tips while they sipped. He’d charge them by the glass, and they seemed delighted to learn a little more about the subject in an atmosphere where they could speak English and wouldn’t be laughed at because they couldn’t name all of Bordeaux’s famous Grands Crus. Winroth told Spurrier that he gave similar wine-tasting seminars in the back rooms of Parisian cafés to American college students on their junior year abroad. The two men mused about some day starting a wine school that would serve both their audiences.

  While cultivating the Anglo-American press and companies, Spurrier did not ignore the French wine establishment. In fact, he courted it with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. With the self-confidence and impetuousness of youth, Spurrier began strong-arming his way into French wine events.

  He absolutely wanted to know Henri Gault and Christian Millau, who were the hot new experts on food, wine, and travel. In 1965, they began publishingLe Nouveau Guide, a restaurant guide with a fresh and breezy style that quickly made it an alternative to the better-known—but hide-bound—Michelin guide. The two later started a monthly magazine on both wines and restaurants that was very influential in setting French tastes. When Spurrier heard that the magazine was staging a tasting of Provençal wines at the swank George V Hotel, just off the Champs-Élysées, he showed up uninvited with several bottles of wine that he sold in his shop. At the door he said in his by now very good French, “I’m Steven Spurrier, and I own the Caves de la Madeleine wine shop. I’d like to enter these wines.” The nonplussed doorman let him in, and somehow Spurrier was quickly invited to be a member of the tasting panel. The French were surprised by his knowledge of wine, and he was soon in tight with the Gault-Millau crowd, which, like him, was young and irreverent.

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bsp; Spurrier also worked his way into the Foire de Paris and the Foire de Mâcon, two big agricultural shows that awarded wine prizes, and before long he was judging wine competitions all over the country.

  When he heard that the prestigious wine magazineLa Revue du Vin de France was giving a test for sommeliers, the wine stewards who work in only the best restaurants, Spurrier showed up uninvited to take the test. Officials told him the examination was for sommeliers only and not for wine merchants, but Spurrier said he still wanted to take it. Reluctantly Odette Kahn, the magazine’s tall and striking-looking editor, allowed him to participate. Spurrier was the only person that day to score a perfect 100 percent on the written part. When Kahn invited him to stay for the wine-tasting section of the examination, Spurrier declined, saying he just wanted to see what the test was like. Intrigued by the young Brit, Kahn quickly took an interest in his wine enterprises.

  Eighteen months after Spurrier bought the Caves de la Madeleine, the locksmith located next door went bankrupt. Spurrier bought the shop at auction, and then suggested to Winroth that they collaborate and start a wine school for Spurrier’s inquisitive American businesspeople and Winroth’s junior-year-abroad students. They called their school the Académie du Vin. Despite the name, instruction would be only in English.

  It took about six months to turn the downstairs area of the locksmith shop, where there had been a forge, into the Académie’s classroom. The ceiling was stripped to expose massive eighteenth-century oak beams. Spurrier hung maps of wine-growing regions on the brick walls and filled a bookcase with tomes on wine in both French and English. In a stroke of luck that seemed to follow all his wine ventures during the 1970s, Spurrier heard that a horseshoe-shaped mahogany bar from the Napoléon III period was for sale at a café near the famous Les Halles food market. It cost only five hundred francs (a hundred dollars), but he had to haul it away that very afternoon.

  Spurrier and Winroth had to call friends around Paris to get enough students for the first class, which they taught together, just before France’s traditional August vacation break in 1972. The class went well, but it convinced Spurrier that he would need help running the wine school. Serendipitously, a young American woman who loved Paris and was trying to find a way to stay happened to call him asking for a job. Patricia Gallagher had met Spurrier while interviewing him for a freelance article she had written for Delaware’sWilmington Morning News . But freelancing for her home state’s main newspaper and doing pick-up work at theHerald Tribune were not going to pay her bills, so she needed a job. Gallagher went to work at the Académie du Vin almost immediately.

  Although she knew little about wine when she joined Spurrier, Gallagher proved a quick study and was soon giving courses and managing the school. While Spurrier was casual and confident as a teacher, she was more serious. I can still recall her, in the course I took, carefully leading her students through an understanding of tannins, a substance found mainly in red wines. She talked about the furry sensation tannins cause in your mouth and how the students should be feeling them, until everyone in the class told her they got it.

  The Académie du Vin was a big hit immediately. Early students told their friends about it, and word spread quickly through the Anglo-American community of this place where people could learn about French wines in English. The press also picked up on the unusual story of a young Englishman running a wine school in Paris. First theHerald Tribune and British papers ran the story; French papers soon followed.

  The initial six-session course was a general introduction to the wine regions of France and cost five hundred francs. After an overview class, the following five weekly meetings concentrated on a single region, going from the Loire Valley in week two to Champagne in week six. After the school’s early success, more specialized courses were offered on specific regions and various vintages. Most of the two-hour sessions were in the early evening so people could take them after work on their way home. Soon more and more students were sitting around the horseshoe bar listening to Spurrier or Gallagher talk about wine. The names of the wines under discussion were written on a blackboard behind the bar, and a platter of cheese, cold cuts, and country bread stood at the ready to accompany the wine. Conversation always became livelier as the classes and the wines progressed.

  Before long even the French were calling and asking to take courses. Hard as it was to believe, the Académie du Vin was the only place in Paris that gave formal programs, in either French or English, in wine appreciation. By then Spurrier was no longer surprised at how little the average French person knew about wine, and he hired a native speaker to teach at the school. Later, the Académie also gave the official program for French sommeliers.

  The Caves de la Madeleine had been a success, but the Académie du Vin put Spurrier into a new orbit. By the mid-1970s, his early Beatles look was replaced by a more conservative Savile Row style. After his mustache came off in 1975, Spurrier looked like the young banker his father had wanted him to be. His father, who had always been dismissive of a wine career, learned how successful his son had become while checking in a rental car at the airport in Bordeaux one day. The young woman at the Hertz counter asked the father, “You aren’t the celebrated wine merchant, by any chance?” He proudly explained that was his son.

  In the Paris of the mid-1970s, Spurrier and Gallagher were excited and exciting. They obviously loved France and all things French, especially wine, which helped them move easily in French society. They became such an item around town that people wondered if they were a couple. They were not. Spurrier’s wife, Bella, was busy raising their two small children in the family’s apartment at the Place de la Bastille, where they moved after they left their barge on the Seine. Meanwhile Gallagher was developing a relationship with a Frenchman she later married.

  Spurrier and Gallagher traveled endlessly to the wine regions of France from Champagne to Bordeaux, talking to vintners and learning more about French wines. The more they learned, the more the French liked them. Soon they were also offering trips to wine regions, and their English-speaking customers piled into buses on Saturday mornings and traveled to Burgundy or Alsace.

  Money was the least of worries in those effervescent days around the little wine shop. If Spurrier found something interesting and perhaps amusing, he just did it. He was not even taking a salary from his company, still living on his inheritance. What really mattered was having fun, and he and Gallagher were doing things that the staid French wine establishment had never done—and probably would never even have thought of doing.

  In May 1972, Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Paris as part of warming diplomatic relations between the two countries that led to Britain’s entry into the European Common Market the following year. One of the events during her stay was a dinner the queen hosted at the British embassy for French president Georges Pompidou. Shortly before her visit, Spurrier received a phone call from Major General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones, a dedicated Francophile who had planted 4.5 acres of Seyve-Villard and Chardonnay vines in Hambledon, a town near Portsmouth in southern England. He suggested serving his dry white wine at the dinner for Pompidou. Wouldn’t it be greatly amusing to serve an English wine to the president of France? Spurrier also thought it a great idea and ordered five cases of Sir Guy’s wine. Dinner planners at the embassy put it on the menu.

  Two days before the event, however, Spurrier got a call from customs agents at Orly Airport outside Paris. An official said the Hambledon wine had arrived, but there was a problem. With time short before the dinner, Spurrier raced to Orly to see the customs agent, who told him that unfortunately the wine could not be imported into France.

  “But why not?” asked Spurrier. “It has arrived, and here are the papers.”

  “Because English wine does not exist,” the customs agent replied. “Here is my list of goods that can be exported from England to France. There is no wine. There is no such thing as English wine, so I cannot clear it through customs. I cannot clear what do
esn’t exist.” Spurrier was trapped in the maddening French logic that has driven the English crazy for a thousand years. Frustrated and seeing no way around this standoff with the stubborn civil servant, Spurrier reluctantly returned to Paris.

  But the next day he called the customs officer for a second try. “Do me a favor,” Spurrier said. “It’s only sixty bottles. Let’s just pretend that it’s French wine. I’ll pay you whatever I have to.”

  “I’m sorry, monsieur,” said the official. “I cannot do that. We will have to send the cases back to England.”

  “No, don’t do that! I’m coming back to Orly.”

  “It’s no use, monsieur. There’s nothing I can do.”

  When Spurrier returned to the airport and walked into the custom agent’s office, he saw the five cases of wine on the floor next to the man’s desk. “But the wine is there! You see it!” Spurrier said with growing exasperation.

  “Of course, monsieur. It is physically there, but the wine does not exist because it is not on the list of exported English products.”

  Spurrier lost his temper and like a schoolmaster addressing a particularly dull student asked, “Does your job exist? Do you like your job?”

  “Of course, monsieur.”

  “Well, in about two hours your job will no longer exist because this wine is supposed to be served tonight to President Pompidou and the Queen of England. If the wine is not there, you will be held responsible.”

  With amazing speed, the customs officer put the proper stamps on the official papers, and the wine was cleared through customs. Spurrier was soon on his way back to Paris with the nonexistent wine. That night the Queen served it to her French guests, who doubtlessly opined, “How curious! An English wine!”