Blog: Steven Spurrier

One of the great joys of wine lies in comparisons. Even if a type of wine can stand on its own - Champagne is the perfect celebration glass for example - there is no reason not to compare the taste of one Champagne to another, or of Champagnes in general to the excellent sparkling wines made all over the world. Another fascinating comparison is that of a young wine from a certain estate to an older, more mature version: same soil, same grapes, same winery, but different vintages and very different expressions. These, and endless other comparisons can be done openly, even from memory - professional wine tasters always keep a note of what they drink and just writing down a few words on the wine lodges it conveniently in the brain - and generally the comparisons are "like with like".

Taken one step further, these comparisons can become competitions. The format is simple: a producer of an excellent, but little-known, wine places his bottle head-to-head against the international benchmarks, a vinous David and Goliath. If his wine is judged better, he can say he is better than the benchmarks, which are generally ten times the price and one hundred times more famous; even if his bottle only approaches them in the final ranking, he can say "almost as good as Chateau X."

The benchmark wines, of course, cannot really win, as they are top of their trees by reputation. This comparison/competition can only be done when the origin of the wine is obscured, so the tasting is known as "blind". Were the labels visible, the judges would be influenced by the names of the benchmarks, but not by the name of the pretender.

The most famous of all blind tastings was held in Paris in 1976. I should know, for I was behind it. In 1971 I had taken over a small wine shop in the centre of Paris - Les Caves de la Madeleine - and two years later opened a wine school - L'Academie du Vin - the first private wine school in France. That there should have been an Englishman teaching the French about wine was indeed odd, but they did need teaching, as they knew very little about their own wines (except that they thought they were the best) and absolutely nothing about wines from outside their own country.

L'Academie du Vin quickly became a "must visit" for any foreign journalist or producer and by the mid 1970s I had been introduced to some very good wines from California, particularly the white Chardonnays and the red Cabernet Sauvignons. I decided that these wines should be recognised for their quality, grown on the other side of the world, but made with French grapes in recognition of the great wines from France.

Using the peg of the Bicentennial celebrations of the 1776 War of Independence against England, I invited the best palates in France to taste six California Chardonnays against four top white Burgundies, and six California Cabernets against four top red Bordeaux, the latter including the First Growths Chateau Haut-Brion and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. The tasting - on the terrace of the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris on May 24th 1976 - had to be blind, so the tasters were not influenced by the labels. Whereas I was hoping that the Californians would get perhaps a 2nd and a 4th, and so acquit themselves well, nobody was more surprised than me to find that Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 1973 was voted first (beating Batard Montrachet and Meursault Charmes), as was Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon 1973, the two of them from Napa Valley.

Only one journalist attended this event, George Taber from Time Magazine, for the Parisian newspapers deemed it to be without interest. Soon afterwards a full column appeared in Time under the title "The Judgement of Paris". California wines were launched around the world and the first chink in the domination of French wines had been made. The Wall Street Journal described the Paris event as "the tasting that shook the wine world". The owners of the Bordeaux and Burgundy wines said that the tasting was without meaning as I had been comparing "apples and oranges", but the grapes were the same and the vintages similar, just that the wines were made by different people in different countries.

To answer the question that red Bordeaux needed to age, I re-did the tasting with the same red wines in New York in 1986, and this time two California wines took the honours. I did nothing in 1996, but was persuaded to hold a re-match, simultaneously in Napa Valley and in London on May 24th 2006, and in both countries, with nine tasters on each table and EXACTLY the same wines as in 1976, the California wines took the first five out of ten places.

There were many reasons for this, but there is no time to go into these now. Suffice it to say that the role of the "underdog" is to match itself against the benchmarks and if it is good enough to succeed, the rest is history. Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, for example - an unknown winery in 1976 - expanded mightily and was sold last year for $185,000,000; Chateau Montelena recently turned down an offer for $115,000,000.

Next time, I will tell you about "The Judgement of Berlin".