In May 1976, a courtly English wine merchant living in Paris organised a modest blind tasting that would, almost by accident, humble French wine and remake the entire wine world. His name was Steven Spurrier, and the event has been known ever since as the Judgment of Paris1.
He fully expected the French wines to win. They did not — and nothing about the global pecking order of wine was ever quite the same again3.
Quick facts
- Steven Spurrier was an English wine merchant running a shop and wine school in Paris.
- On 24 May 1976 he staged a blind tasting of California wines against France’s best.
- A panel of nine French judges chose California in both the red and white flights.
- Reported by TIME, it launched California — and the whole New World — onto the world stage.
An Englishman in Paris
Born in England in 1941, Spurrier fell in love with fine wine young and moved to Paris, where he bought a small wine shop, the Caves de la Madeleine, and founded a wine school, the Académie du Vin1. He was, by every account, a devoted Francophile who had staked his life and livelihood on French wine — which makes what he did next all the more improbable5.
With his American colleague Patricia Gallagher, he hit on the idea of a friendly transatlantic tasting to mark the United States Bicentennial: a handful of upstart California bottles set blind against the aristocracy of Burgundy and Bordeaux. It was meant, in part, as a bit of promotional theatre for the shop. It became something else entirely2.
The tasting, 24 May 1976
Spurrier assembled a jury of nine of France’s most respected palates — among them Aubert de Villaine, co-director of the almost sacred Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Odette Kahn, editor of a leading French wine magazine3. California Chardonnays were poured against white Burgundy, and California Cabernets against classed-growth Bordeaux, every label hidden. The judges tasted, scored aloud, and confidently — audibly — mistook several Californian wines for French ones4.
When the scores were tallied, California had taken the top place in both flights:
| Flight | Winner | Wine |
|---|---|---|
| White | Château Montelena (Napa) | 1973 Chardonnay |
| Red | Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (Napa) | 1973 S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon |
The reaction was pure theatre. Realising what the results implied, Odette Kahn is said to have demanded her scorecard back so it could not be published — Spurrier refused3. The French establishment’s certainty that greatness could come only from French soil had just been overturned by its own experts, in Paris, at a French table.
The only reporter in the room
Spurrier had invited the press, but on the day only one journalist bothered to turn up: George Taber of TIME6. His brief dispatch, headlined “Judgment of Paris,” ran in the magazine and detonated across the wine world. Had Taber stayed home, the tasting might have vanished into a footnote; instead his four paragraphs became one of the most consequential pieces of wine writing ever published7.
Overnight, the centuries-old assumption that truly great wine could come only from France was broken, and California stepped into the light.
Spurrier’s legacy
The ripples never really stopped. The tasting cracked the door for the entire New World — California first, then Australia, Chile, South Africa, New Zealand — to be taken seriously beside Europe, and it emboldened a generation of winemakers who had been told their terroir could never measure up4.
Spurrier, for his part, spent the rest of his life in wine as a writer and long-time columnist for Decanter, and in a final irony the great champion of French wine planted his own English sparkling-wine vineyard, Bride Valley, before his death in 20211. The winning bottles now sit in the Smithsonian — relics of the afternoon a Francophile Englishman accidentally proved that great wine can come from anywhere, and set California on the road that had begun, two centuries earlier, with a friar’s mission vine8.
Frequently asked questions
More from this day in wine history
See everything else that happened on August 24 — who was born, what was bottled, and which laws were signed.
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References
- UC Davis Library — Remembering Steven Spurrier and the 1976 Judgment of Paris Tasting. library.ucdavis.edu ↩
- Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars — The 1976 Judgment of Paris. www.stagsleapwinecellars.com ↩
- CNN — Judgment of Paris: the tasting that changed wine forever. www.cnn.com ↩
- Ridge Vineyards — The Judgment of Paris. www.ridgewine.com ↩
- San Francisco Wine School — Steven Spurrier: Father of the Judgment of Paris. sanfranciscowineschool.com ↩
- Decanter — Steven Spurrier, wine writer and organiser of the Judgment of Paris (obituary). www.decanter.com ↩
- Smithsonian, National Museum of American History — the Judgment of Paris bottles. americanhistory.si.edu ↩
- Château Montelena — Paris 1976. montelena.com ↩
Recommended reading
George M. Taber
The definitive inside account, by the only journalist in the room, of the blind tasting that changed the wine world.
Thomas Pinney
The scholarly history of American wine that frames how California reached the moment it could beat France.
As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book recommendations are chosen independently.
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