The Paris tasting: what happened next

So what did the controversial results of the Judgement of Paris Tasting mean, and what kind of difference has it made for the Californian wine industry 40 years on? Elin McCoy reports

ImmEDIATEly AfTER GEoRGE Taber’s article in the 7 June issue of Time magazine was published, telephones started ringing across the Napa Valley.

At Chateau montelena, reporters were calling and so were wine distributors, begging for cases of the Chardonnay that they hadn’t wanted just a few months before. Bo Barrett, whose family owns the winery, says they struggled to keep up with the calls.

montelena winemaker mike Grgich’s phone rang with the news that The New York Times was sending a photographer to take his picture for an article. Next came the flood of job offers. The publicity helped him start his own winery, Grgich Hills.

At Stag’s leap Wine Cellars, cars lined up outside the winery’s tiny retail shop, all clamouring for the winning Cabernet. Warren Winiarski says: ‘I had to restrict sales to one bottle per customer.’

over in french wine-obsessed New york, mike Kapon’s Acker merrall & Condit wine shop had been one of the city’s few champions of Californian wine. When the story broke in Time, his stack of cases of montelena Chardonnay sold out in an hour. When he tried to order more, he recalls, he couldn’t get any.

‘The Paris Tasting was a Copernican moment,’ says Winiarski, a former political philosophy professor. ‘Just the way no one could look at sun and stars the same way after Copernicus, we could never look at wine the same way after the Paris Tasting. It proved that beautiful wines could be made outside france.’

It also conferred immediate respectability on California wine. ‘It put us on the world map of great wine-producing regions,’ the late Robert mondavi once told me.

The tasting also jump-started the state’s fine-wine industry. At the time, the number of high-end boutique wineries was minuscule, points out Jon fredrikson of wine-consulting firm Gomberg fredrikson, who has been in the wine business for more than four decades.