The Judgment of Paris and the Day American Wine Grew Up

In 1976 California humbled France in a blind tasting in Paris. Three years later, a little Oregon Pinot did its own quiet damage — and the wine world was never the same.

Researched and drafted with AI, then verified three ways for accuracy — cross-checked against independent sources, audited by a separate AI accuracy pass, and reviewed by editor Ken Wytsma.

On 24 May 1976, in a Paris hotel, a British wine merchant named Steven Spurrier staged a blind tasting that was supposed to be a friendly bit of Bicentennial fun: a few California wines against the great names of France, judged by French experts.^[1] Instead it became one of the most consequential afternoons in the wider story of wine history. When the scores were tallied, California had won — and the old certainties cracked.

The tasting that changed everything

The judges, tasting blind, placed a California wine first in both flights: a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, ahead of first-growth Bordeaux and white Burgundy.^[1] A TIME correspondent named George Taber was the only journalist in the room; his short dispatch, “Judgment of Paris,” went around the world. The myth that fine wine could come only from France was, overnight, no longer tenable.

A blind tasting is a brutal thing: it strips away the label and leaves only the wine. In Paris, the wine spoke for itself.

Oregon’s own Paris moment

If 1976 cracked the door, Oregon walked through it three years later. In 1979 the French magazine Gault-Millau ran its own blind “Wine Olympiad,” and David Lett’s 1975 Eyrie South Block Pinot Noir — from a region almost no one had heard of — placed tenth among the Pinot Noirs — though Lett himself later remembered it as third.^[2] The Burgundian Robert Drouhin, sure it was a fluke, staged a rematch in 1980. The little Oregon wine came second, beaten by two-tenths of a point by Drouhin’s own 1959 Chambolle-Musigny, a village wine carrying two decades of bottle age — and Drouhin was impressed enough to plant his own vineyard in the Dundee Hills.^[2] It is the founding legend told in full in our profile of David Lett and the Eyrie Vineyards.

Why a blind tasting mattered so much

It is worth asking why a tasting could carry such weight. The answer is a quarter-turn away from the wine itself: national pride. In the 1970s, the idea that an American — or, more outrageously, an Oregonian — could beat France at its own table touched something far larger than viticulture. It was a story about confidence, about the New World coming of age, the same current that ran through earlier American wine dreamers like Thomas Jefferson and through the rise of Napa Valley. That confidence is the inheritance of every glass poured today — including on a Willamette Valley wine tour, where this exact history is on the table.

Related reading: Papa Pinot: David Lett · The history of Oregon wine

See also: The Monk in the Vineyard — our flagship on how a medieval idea called terroir ended up in a glass of Willamette Pinot.

From our shelf

Want to read more?

Books we drew on and recommend for going deeper.

Judgment of ParisGeorge M. Taber9000 Years of Wine: A World HistoryRod PhillipsThe Story of Wine: From Noah to NowHugh Johnson

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