In the early 1970s Steven Spurrier, an English wine merchant, and Patricia Gallagher, his American partner, had a small wine shop in Paris in a cul-de-sac near the Place de la Concorde, where, in an adjacent building, they also gave courses in wine to their enthusiastic customers. Almost inevitably, Spurrier and Gallagher developed a considerable clientele among expatriate Americans. The U.S. Embassy was a block or two away, the substantial offices of IBM were almost next door, and American law firms were scattered all around them. Through word of mouth, their Caves de la Madeleine became a regular stop for California wine producers and others making the rounds of the French wine scene. Often these visitors brought a bottle or two with them, and Spurrier was able to taste what he has described as “some exceptional [California] wines.”
At their shop Spurrier and Gallagher dealt in French wines (except for a few of the most ordinary commercial blends, there were no California wines available in Paris at that time), but they decided to use the excuse of the United States’s bi-centenary to show a selection of California wines to French journalists and others connected with the wine world. They were sure that they would make a good impression on the French and thought they might even surprise them. They hoped, too, that any stories generated in the press might bring in a new client or two.
With their bicentenary plan in mind, Gallagher visited California in the fall of 1975 and Spurrier followed in the spring of 1976, during which time he picked out six Chardonnays and six Cabernet Sauvignons, all of recent vintages, that he thought would give a fair picture of what was going on in California. He needed two bottles of each, and, knowing he might have difficulty bringing two cases of wine through French customs, he arranged for a group of twelve tennis enthusiasts on the point of leaving for a wine and tennis tour of France to carry two bottles each in their hand baggage.
To give the wines a context and ensure they would be judged without prejudice, he decided to offer them for tasting in unidentified, wrapped bottles and to mix in among them a few white Burgundies and red Bordeaux. He knew he would have to choose among the very best of these or risk the suspicion that he and Gallagher had set up the California wines to score off the French. He knew, too, that because he would be showing the wines blind—that is, unmarked—and asking the tasters to rank their preferences, the credentials of those participating would have to be impeccable; otherwise any approving nods toward California might be dismissed as stemming from a lack of familiarity with the niceties of French wines.
The tasting took place at the InterContinental Hotel. The panel members—experienced and of high repute—were all French: Pierre Brejoux, then chief inspector of the National Institute of Appellations of Origin; Aubert de Villaine, part-owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti; Michel Dovaz, a wine writer and enologist; Claude Dubois-Millot, from Le Nouveau Guide; Odette Kahn, editor of the influential Revue du Vin de France; Raymond Oliver, the celebrated chef and owner of Le Grand Véfour; Pierre Tari, owner of Château Giscours, a cru classé of the Médoc, and secretary-general of the Syndicat des Grands Crus Classés; Christian Vannèque, head sommelier of Tour d’Argent; and Jean-Claude Vrinat, owner of Taillevent.
The Chardonnays brought by Spurrier’s tennis players from California bore the labels of Spring Mountain ’73, Free-mark Abbey ’72, Chalone ’74, Veedercrest ’72, Château Montelena ’73, and David Bruce ’73. He added to them four white Burgundies: Meursault-Charmes, Domaine Roulot ’73; Beaune Clos des Mouches ’73, from Drouhin; Bâtard-Montrachet ’73, of Ramonet-Prudhon; and Puligny-Montrachet, Premier Cru Les Pucelles ’72, from Domaine Leflaive.
Spurrier’s Cabernet Sauvignons were Clos du Val’s ’72; the ’71s of Mayacamas and of Ridge Vineyards’s Mountain Range; Freemark Abbey’s ’69; Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars’s ’73; and Heitz Cellar’s Martha’s Vineyard ’70. I wondered why he had not included wines such as Robert Mondavi’s ’69 Cabernet Sauvignon or the Georges de Latour Private Reserve ’70—both of these wines yardsticks by which other California Caber-net Sauvignons were being measured at the time.
“I simply didn’t get to taste them,” he told me recently, whereas he had already tasted a number of the wines he did select, and the rest had been chosen based on visits to wineries made on the advice of friends.
Nothing was left to chance in his choice of Bordeaux to put alongside the California reds. They were Château Mouton-Rothschild ’70, Château Haut-Brion ’70, Château Montrose ’70, and Château Léoville-Las-Cases ’71. A formidable group of wines.
Members of the jury knew only that some of the wines were French and some from California. Once they had graded the ten white wines—poured from their wrapped bottles—on a scale of twenty points, they did the same with the reds, and a group order of preference was determined. Among the journalists present as spectators was the Paris bureau chief of Time, and in the magazine’s international edition of June 7 he announced the group’s decisions to the world.
Among the white wines, California’s Château Montelena headed the list, followed by the Meursault-Charmes, Chalone, Spring Mountain, Beaune Clos des Mouches, Freemark Abbey, Bâtard-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, Veedercrest, and David Bruce. A California wine, the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars ’73, was first among the reds, too. It was followed, respectively, by the Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château Haut-Brion, Château Montrose, Ridge Mountain Range, Château Léoville-Las-Cases, Mayacamas, Clos du Val, Heitz Cellar Martha’s Vineyard, and Freemark Abbey.
In California, growers took the news calmly—“Not bad for kids from the sticks” was the reported response of Château Montelena’s owner, Jim Barrett. But in France, and particularly in Bordeaux, there was consternation and, one might say without exaggeration, a degree of shock. It was not that California’s success diminished in any way the real quality or value of the French wines—they had been used, after all, as the measure by which the others were judged—but the published results challenged the French in a field where they had assumed their superiority to be unassailable.
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.