This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Steven Spurrier was always insistent he didn’t mean to cause a diplomatic incident when he organised a wine tasting in Paris to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.
All he wanted to do was to demonstrate how good the wines of California were to some of the big cheeses of French wine such as Aubert de Villaine, owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and the imperious Odette Kahn from La Revue du vin de France.
The event, which took place on 24 May at the Intercontinental Hotel 50 years ago, would send shockwaves through the wine world and became known as the Judgement of Paris. Some of the French who took part suspected the whole thing was a set-up to make them look stupid (which it did) but Spurrier claimed that was not his intention at all.
Originally there was to be no judging element involved but according to his memoir, A Life in Wine, Spurrier worried that “the tasters’ innate Frenchness might result in their being ‘damned with faint praise’”. In other words, they would react to the California wines like typical French wine snobs.
“With just a week to go, I made the decision to turn it into a ‘blind’,” he wrote. The judges would taste the wines without being aware of their provenance, issue each with a score out of 20 and to spice things up he threw in some of the best of Bordeaux, including first growths Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion, and Burgundy, like the Puligny-Montrachet from Domaine Leflaive, to face off against their Californian opponents.
The fact that only one member of the press was invited, George Taber from Time magazine, almost as an afterthought suggests that Spurrier wasn’t expecting an upset, though it must have crossed his mind what would happen if a California wine won. I wish I had asked him about it before he died in 2021.
Round one was Burgundy versus California Chardonnay. Taber explained what happened next in his article: “The judges were becoming totally confused as they tasted the white wines. The panel couldn’t tell the difference between the French ones and those from California.”
One of the judges, Claude Dubois-Millot from the Gault & Millau guide, admitted: “We thought we were recognising French wines when they were Californian and vice versa.” After the judges had submitted their scores, Spurrier announced the results of the first round. The winner was Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 1973 from California. Not only that but, he wrote: “Every single judge rated a California wine first.” Absolute scenes.
When it was time for the claret versus Californian Cabernet round, the 11 judges were determined to maintain the honour of France. Taber noted that they marked down severely the wines they thought were Californian. It almost worked.
Of the top four wines, three were French but the one with the highest score was Stag’s Leap Cabernet 1973 beating Mouton Rothschild 1970 by one and a half points. The judges’ reactions “ranged from shock to horror”. Spurrier faced the wrath of Kahn who demanded her scorecard back before leaving. She later said: “It was a false test because California wines are trying to become too much like French wines.”
Thanks largely to Taber’s article, the Judgement of Paris is an event that has lingered in the imagination ever since. He later wrote a book on the subject which was the basis for a terrible film called Bottle Shock with Alan Rickman hamming it up as Spurrier.
The format has been much copied, not least by English wine producers. I took part in one last year called the Battle of the Bubbles where the best sparkling wines of the world took on the might of Champagne and the winner was … Nyetimber 1086 (2010) from England.
The long — term ramifications of the 1976 tasting are complex. Yes, it announced to the Europeans that California wine had arrived, but it didn’t see the eclipse of France. Quite the opposite. Aubert de Villaine described the event as “un coup dans la derrière pour les vins français”. The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s would prove a golden age for Bordeaux with great vintages, rising interest globally thanks to critics such as Robert Parker and a surge in prices. The event was rerun in 2006 with the latest wines from the same producers and “the California wines simply wiped the floor with those from Bordeaux,” according to Spurrier.
The shock result caused a surge in demand for the top Californian producers. Previously East Coast collectors had turned their noses up at domestic wines. But well-heeled wine lovers outside the US largely stuck with Bordeaux and Burgundy or more recently Piedmont and Tuscany. The real winners from the New World were Australia, Chile and Argentina. California wine, outside the US, is still a niche pursuit.
The Judgement’s longevity as a cultural touchstone, however, is not really about the relative merits of Californian and French wine. We are still talking about it because Anglophones love to see both wine snobs and the French being made to look ridiculous. We’ve had our differences with the Americans since 1776, but that’s something we can both agree on.
