Just a few decades ago it would have been absurd to suggest that a California wine could match the quality of a French wine. But the landscape of the wine industry changed in 1976 when Steven Spurrier, the owner of a small Paris wine shop, sponsored a blind tasting of California and French wines. In this event, a series of white and red wines, vintage 1973, were sampled by some of the premier French wine experts of the time.
The story is told by George M. Taber, a reporter and editor for Time magazine for over twenty-five years. The tasting was expected to be such a clear win for France that Taber, then a young wine lover himself, was the only reporter to even attend the event. As the tasting progressed, he tells of his shock: “I had a list of the wines and realized that the judges were getting confused! They were identifying a French wine as a California one and vice versa.” The event inspired wild speculation (for example, that the tasting took place under a portrait of Thomas Jefferson), bitter public reaction to the judges and Spurrier (some claimed that he falsified the results), and calls for the head of Inspector General of the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée Board (a quality control and regulation position that oversees French wine making) to step down.
Meanwhile, Taber’s original coverage of the event appeared in Time on page fifty-eight and was “overwhelmed by an ad for Armstrong tires.” Yet the short article caught people’s attention, and they started buying the California wines mentioned in it like crazy.
But this book is more than a blow-by-blow of the 1976 tasting. It brings the reader through the history of the wine industry. There are stories of the Gauls (beer drinkers who took a shine to wine and started transporting it in wooden barrels, rather than the traditional clay wine casks introduced by the Romans). And we learn about technological breakthroughs, such as the aging of wine in French oak and the use of selected yeasts to allow low-temperature fermentation.
History shows how the California wine industry has grown in fits and starts through terrible setbacks, including a financial depression in 1893, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that destroyed millions of gallons of wine (most waiting to be blended or shipped), and Prohibition.
Another layer of depth is added by the fascinating back stories of major players in the wine industry, such as Spurrier, Warren Winiarski, Mike Grgich, Robert Mondavi, Rodney Strong, and Jim Barrett, all of whom helped the California wine industry compete with the formidable French power chateaus.
It is fascinating to read about the evolution of an industry. This book is a wonderful education on the California wine industry and is great entertainment to boot.
- Manda Salls