“We could in the United States make as great a variety of wines as are made in Europe, not exactly the same kind, but doubtless as good.”

Thomas Jefferson 1808

On May 24, 1976, close to the bicentennial of the American Revolution, there was a blind wine tasting of 20 wines in a Paris hotel.

Among a number of French wine critics, there was only one reporter there – George M. Taber from Time magazine. It was a hurried tasting; there was a wedding reception right afterward.

But it those two hours, the entire wine world changed forever, an epic wine revolution took place and the Paris tasting was the historic “shot heard around the world.” It is the event that wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. said “destroyed the myth of French supremacy and marked the democratization of the history of wine.”

That historic tasting where California wines won over the finest French wines is known as “the Paris tasting,” and the implications of everything that followed is documented in George M. Taber’s most excellent book Judgment of Paris.

The history of winegrowing in America is full of starts and stops. And in the 19th century, good wines in the European style were being produced in Napa Valley, which Native Americans in the region referred to as “the land of abundance.”

But the insanity of Prohibition put a stop to fine wine production. Although limited amounts of wine was allowed to be made at home, Prohibition eliminated the use of the noble grapes such as cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir, whose thins skins made long travel to home winemakers almost impossible.

After Prohibition, there was no market for California fine wines and the industry had to reinvent itself. While some winemakers like the Gallo brothers concentrated on bulk wine production, a few visionary winemakers saw California and the Napa Valley in particular capable of producing great wines as those made in France. The fountainhead of this movement was Andre Tchelistcheff, a Russian-born and French-trained winemaker who transformed the aging and hopelessly outdated winemaking equipment and poorly maintained vineyards at Beaulieu Vineyards to produce quality wines.

Others soon followed, imbued with spirit of Bacchus and impressed with the success of BV. This long list of pioneer winemakers includes Mike Grgich of Chateau Montelena and Warren Winiarski of Stags’ Leap Wine Cellars, among others.

Many people in the early ’70s felt that the quality of wine being produced in California was world class, and Steve Spurrier, a Brit who owned a small wine shop in Paris called Caves de la Madeleine, organized the Paris tasting because of this.

The taste-off he organized consisted of California chardonnay vs. French burgundy and California cabernet sauvignon vs. French bordeaux. Among the California white wines were Chateau Montelena, Spring Mountain, Chalone and others. The burgundies included Batard-Montrachet, Meursault Charmes and Puligny-Montrachet. The California red wines included Stags’ Leap Wine Cellars, Ridge Monte Bello, Mayacamas and others. The French side included Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, Chateau Haut-Brion, Chateau Leoville-Las Case and others. Spurrier thought it would be a lot of fun to put together the taste-off, but he had no idea that it would change the wine world forever.

At the end of the tasting, Spurrier loudly proclaimed that California’s Chateau Montelena and Stags’ Leap Wine Cellars won the blind tasting and beat the burgundy and bordeaux. There was a moment of stunned silence. A few wine critics wanted to change their score, but Spurrier refused to give them back their score cards and everyone had to leave because of the wedding reception.

It took some time for the implication of this historic event to sink in. Taber’s small article about California wines beating French wines appeared in the June 7 issue of Time on page 58. The magazine circulation at that time was 20 million. In New York City, all of the sudden there was a demand for fine California wines.

Because of the Paris tasting, it became clear that the French didn’t have exclusivity on producing great wines; that world-class wines could be produced in California and the rest of the world. The Paris tasting in no small degree was the spark that has led to the globalization of the wine movement, and those countries between the 30th and 50th parallel both north and south of the equator could produce world-class wines if soil and climatic conditions were right.