The French experts who had participated in the tasting, greatly embarrassed, felt a need to excuse themselves: Sophisticated arguments were put forward to explain away their choices. But, even allowing for every extenuating circumstance and accepting—as Spurrier has since said repeatedly—that another jury, or even the same jury on another day, might have placed the wines in a different order, it was clear that California had arrived. Regardless of the statistical reliability of the point system Spurrier had used to establish the group preferences, serious California wines, tasted seriously by serious judges, had at the very least stood shoulder to shoulder with French wines produced from similar grape varieties.
The tasting gave California a shot of confidence and earned it a respect that was long overdue. But it also gave the French a valuable incentive to review traditions that were sometimes mere accumulations of habit and expediency, and to reexamine convictions that were little more than myths taken on trust.
The French were soon all over California—a place they had until then largely ignored—to see what was going on. In no time at all the first of many of their sons and daughters had enrolled in courses at Davis or begun working a crush in California, just as many young Americans had always done in France. And within the year, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, of Château Mouton-Rothschild, was in deep negotiation with Robert Mondavi to form the joint venture we know today as Opus One.
In a recent article in the British publication Decanter, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the tasting, Steven Spurrier said that the recognition given California twenty years ago was recompense for the state’s investment in research and equipment. To some extent he is right. As a consequence of Prohibition, California vineyards had been replanted with coarse shipping varieties; winemaking standards had been seriously compromised; and most wineries had fallen into disrepair. The University of California had had to send its professors on the road to show vintners who had missed traditional father-son instruction how to make clean, flawless wines again. They never claimed to be teaching the art of making fine wine; their task—much more basic—was simply to reestablish the essentials of the craft, to reconnect post-Prohibition wine producers to a heritage that had been lost.
Certain vineyard sites that today are recognized for the quality of the wines they yield may well owe their survival to the professors’ tour—but in fact many were first cultivated a century ago. Robert Mondavi’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is essentially the product of a vineyard, To-Kalon, originally planted by Hamilton Crabb in the 1880s. Spring Mountain now occupies the winery built by Tiburcio Parrott in 1884. (Parrott’s house is familiar to viewers of “Falcon Crest”; in the 1890s he produced there an exceptional Cabernet Sauvignon.) And, as our subject is about recognition, the Liparita winery on Howell Mountain, now active again, took a gold medal for its Cabernet Sauvignon at the Paris Exposition of 1900—then, too, in competition with French wines.
A few weeks ago I saw the actual scores awarded each wine by individual members of the 1976 Paris jury—as opposed to the final rankings published at the time. I was struck first by the fact that all nine judges had given their highest scores for white wine to California—either to Château Montelena or to Chalone. That, it seemed to me, was indeed an endorsement—at least for young wines—of California grape maturity, technique, and hygiene.
And yet something about Spurrier’s attribution of California’s success to equipment—to technology—bothered me. I thought, for example, of Richard Graff’s Chalone Vineyard as I had known it in 1974. Graff had always been a maverick among California wine producers. His vineyard, waterless and difficult to reach, was planted with an old clone of Chardonnay that he had cultivated vine by vine. Neither his methods of cultivation nor his winemaking had much to do with modern California technology. Chalone had little equipment to speak of; in 1974 it was still generating its own limited supply of electricity. And most important of all, at a time when California was only beginning to flirt with oak barrels, Graff had spent a year in France researching a treatise on oak and, probably alone in the California of that period, was fermenting his Chardonnay in the barrel and aging it on the lees. Now, more than twenty years later, that practice is commonplace.
Mike Grgich, then winemaker at Château Montelena, was born into a winegrowing family in Croatia and had perfected his craft first with Lee Stewart at the old Souverain winery on Howell Mountain (now the home of Burgess Cellars). A legend in California in the 1950s and 1960s, Stewart, self-taught, was obsessed by the details of winemaking. For him, it was the small things that counted. “I learned from Lee to watch over a wine as I would a baby,” Grgich told Richard Paul Hinkle in a recent, anniversary interview for the trade publication Wines & Vines. From Stewart, Grgich moved on to André Tcheli-stcheff, the man behind the success of Beaulieu Vineyards’s Georges de Latour Private Reserve, “who taught me to look at wine from the vineyard,” and then to Robert Mondavi, “who made me aware of temperature control and French oak.” When Grgich went to Château Montelena, he applied what he’d learned. “By then I knew how to handle a wine gently,” he told me. “To disturb it as little as possible.” The grapes for his winning 1973 had, like Graff’s, also come from an old Chardonnay clone.
The Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon was the only California red to place among the first four. Surely it is more than coincidence that Warren Winiarski, the man who made it, should also have been an alumnus first of Lee Stewart, “a fastidious man who applied himself to every aspect of his wine,” then of André Tchelistcheff, and, finally, of Robert Mondavi. “André gave us the soaring, the poetic vision. He had the gift of articulating what wine was to be, raising our horizons,” Winiarski told Hinkle. “Robert provided the push, the thrust to get things done. Details and vision are nothing without the will to execute them.”
It took a while longer for California’s new crop of younger winemakers to learn these same lessons: to free themselves from technology; to abandon their expensive high-speed pumps and centrifuges; to reassess what “cellar hygiene” means (it doesn’t mean keeping nature at bay with laboratory-prepared yeasts, preventing contact between a wine and its lees, and avoiding malolactic fermentation, the bacterial change that softens a wine and draws its disparate elements together); and to understand that fine wine is indeed made in the vineyard. In fact, it was a traditional, low-tech California that was honored that day in Paris in 1976. What the French recognized in wines they’d never tasted before was not equipment and rampant technology. It was the quality inherent in mature California vines; the skill and artistry of men like Richard Graff, Mike Grgich, and Warren Winiarski; and the vision of those who had gone before them.
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