Remembering ‘The Judgment of Paris’

Forty years ago this week, the wine world got recalibrated in a big way. In a blind tasting that has come to be remembered as “The Judgment of Paris,” a chardonnay from Chateau Montelena and a cabernet sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Winery, both in Napa Valley, outscored some of France’s greatest wines. It would be French judges, experts all, who made the call, and when they found out what they’d done … ooo la la!

There was no mystery surrounding the 1973 Stag’s Leap cab’s fruit source. The grapes came from 3-year-old vines that had been planted right there on Warren Winiarski’s new property just east of the Silverado Trail. But for Montelena to make a chardonnay, which was badly needed in 1973 to generate income while the estate’s own baby cabernet vines were becoming mature enough to produce a drinkable wine, winemaker Mike Grgich had a mandate to buy grapes elsewhere. He found most of them in Sonoma County, not Napa Valley.

Grgich’s final blend included fruit from at least three significant sites: the Bacigalupi Vineyard in a then remote corner of the Russian River Valley, Chateau St. Jean’s Belle Terre Vineyard north of Sonoma on California Highway 12 and the John Muir Hanna Vineyard in Napa Valley’s Oak Knoll District, slightly north of Napa proper. In the end, some 85 percent of the grapes in the historic Montelena were from Sonoma.

The runner-up chardonnay in Paris, a Meursault Charmes Roulot, was, of course, totally terroir driven, the complete opposite of Grgich’s wine. It’s hard to imagine an upstart mongrel from the New World upstaging French royalty — the French wine hierarchy found the possibility to be preposterous — but that’s how things came down.

Therefore, to celebrate the anniversary of this gamechanging event, I threw four wines into a recent tasting that have at least peripheral ties to that historic Montelena chardonnay. Each earned a unanimous recommendation and are featured here. Pairings for the wines, all fundamentally Californian in personality and flavor profile, are pretty interchangeable. Try lobster with drawn butter or chicken and pork prepared any number of ways. Creamy cheeses, too.