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It was the taste-off that turned wine upside down.
In 1976, an esteemed all-French jury gathered in Paris for a blind tasting to compare eight of France’s greatest wines against a dozen upstarts from California. In an upset worthy of Hollywood, the United States trounced France, winning top honours in both the red and white categories.
Now, Hollywood has finally found its way to the story. Not one but two films based on the so-called Judgment of Paris will duke it out for attention this year. Bottle Shock, a rollicking comedy-drama based on true events that stars Alan Rickman, opens in Toronto on Aug. 6 and is slated to roll out to theatres across the country later in the summer. The second film, Judgment of Paris, based on the official story by the only journalist to attend the Paris tasting, Time magazine’s George Taber, is due later this year.
The event’s significance has predictably been interpreted the same way ever since: California had vaulted its way into the wine stratosphere. True. But if there’s justice, the films will also be a reminder – in these boom times for wine snobbery – of a message far more overdue.
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Lost in the nationalistic dustup was a collateral truth merely implied by Mr. Taber’s news story and deliciously hinted at in the great climax scene of Bottle Shock.
The message? Without the benefit of a glance at the label, wine connoisseurship is so much hot air and bluster.
I’ve seen Bottle Shock, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it’s well worth the price of a decent bottle of Gallo chardonnay. Filmed almost entirely in California, it’s a sort of Rocky-with-grapes tale about the buildup to the Paris tasting at one winery, Chateau Montelena, which supplied the winning chardonnay. Mr. Rickman’s understated portrayal of Steven Spurrier, the upper-crust Brit who organized the tasting and travels to California to source the U.S. entries personally, is something to behold, even if a few of the other performances run more toward typical Hollywood caricature.
One might ask why two films would suddenly materialize more than three decades after the fact. No doubt a big reason is Sideways, the 2004 sleeper hit from director Alexander Payne that proved pinot noir could be gold at the box office.
Another is the 2005 book Judgment of Paris by Mr. Taber, Time magazine’s former Paris correspondent.
In fact, though credit for masterminding American wine’s pivotal historical moment has always gone to Mr. Spurrier, perhaps an equally critical player was Mr. Taber, whose initiative on what he calls in his book “an otherwise slow afternoon” ensured that the low-key tasting did not fade into obscurity.
“Americans abroad have been boasting for years about California wines, only to be greeted in most cases by polite disbelief – or worse,” he wrote in the article published June 7, 1976. “Last week in Paris, at a formal wine tasting organized by Spurrier, the unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul.”
That last line became the enduring message of the event, of course – the Eagle had landed on the wine map.
But as Mr. Taber also entertainingly observed, it wasn’t just that the French judges clearly preferred two California wines to the rest. Some actually believed they were tasting France’s mythical terroir – the unique soil composition and special microclimates of its famous vineyards – in the rookie cowboy juice from Napa.
“Ah, back to France!” said one judge upon sipping a Napa chardonnay.
“That is definitely California. It has no nose,” said another after downing the Ramonet-Prudhon Bâtard-Montrachet 1973, a top-ranked white Burgundy, which placed seventh out of 10 chardonnays.
No nose? Talk about calling the kettle noir. But then, I’ve always advocated calling connoisseurs “cons” for short. I’ve attended far too many professional blind tastings to have much respect for people who boast about their tasting abilities.
Am I being too harsh? I think not. Frankly, to confuse an aristocratic Bâtard-Montrachet from continental-climate Burgundy with a warm-weather Napa chardonnay is the wine equivalent of mistaking a Massenet opera for Cats on Broadway. The tasters knew it, too, which is why some tried to suppress or dismiss the Paris results after the bottles came out of their paper bags.
These were no third-rate, tin palates, either. They included Pierre Bréjoux, inspector-general of the Appellation d’Origine Côntrolée board, which regulates the production of top French wines; Odette Kahn, editor of the Revue du Vin de France; Raymond Oliver, chef-owner of famed Le Grand Véfour restaurant; and Aubert de Villaine, co-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, which makes Burgundy’s most expensive wine (at $1,800 a bottle).
If these people couldn’t breeze through a taste test of iconic French wines, which they encounter virtually every day, who can? Certainly not your garden-variety wine bores here, who grandstand at some of the dinner parties you may have the misfortune to attend.
It’s not just my opinion. As Georg Riedel, head of the famous Austrian wine-glass company who’s seen his share of boneheaded guesses by famous palates, once wisely and humbly told me, “A label on a wine substitutes 10,000 years of [tasting] experience.”
There is no myth about wine more enduring than that of the Olympian taster, the man or woman who can, with one sip, instantly peg a wine down to the vineyard, harvest year and grape blend. Such legendary stunts, when not actually apocryphal, almost always sound more impressive than they are.
Scratch the surface and you’ll usually find the field of potential wines was implicitly very limited. Until about 40 years ago, when Bordeaux and Burgundy were the be-all and end-all, the “blind wine” was virtually always pulled from a tiny list of well-known estates in the hearts of those regions – the Moutons, the Cheval Blancs and the Romanée-Contis. If you had tasted enough of those wines from a bunch of recent vintages (not difficult and not a financial hardship in those pre-hyperinflation days), you could acquit yourself pretty well. There was no fear, say, of somebody slipping in a Chilean cabernet (a style of wine, incidentally, that defeated Bordeaux once again in a repeat of the Paris tasting a few years ago using an all-European jury).
But here’s the most important thing to know about those tall tasting tales: As with rags-to-riches stories, only the fluky, Horatio Alger-type exceptions tend to live on in history, not the run-of-the-mill failures. In a fair tasting with no implicit clues, most experts will embarrass themselves most of the time. At a recent trade dinner in Toronto, one of Canada’s best-known wine critics guessed a 1971 Chateau Latour, a famous cabernet sauvignon from Bordeaux, was a pinot noir, a variety so distinct from cabernet as to almost be another fruit.
Ironically, Bottle Shock perpetuates that superhuman-taster myth even as the factual part of the story undermines it. In one pivotal, fictional scene, Gustavo, a Mexican-American cellar hand employed by Chateau Montelena, wows a crowded Napa barroom by identifying the legendary 1947 Cheval Blanc, a red Bordeaux, in an impromptu brown-bag challenge.
So, let me get this straight: A spunky American kid can nail the nuances of great French terroir in a blind tasting when an esteemed panel of seasoned European experts can’t?
Apparently, 32 years after French arrogance got its comeuppance in the Judgment of Paris, wine jingoism is alive and well and living in America.
