Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris.
California won both categories.
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