It was the taste-off that turned wine upside down.
In 1976, an esteemed all-French jury gathered in Paris for a blind tasting to compare eight of France's greatest wines against a dozen upstarts from California. In an upset worthy of Hollywood, the United States trounced France, winning top honours in both the red and white categories.
Now, Hollywood has finally found its way to the story. Not one but two films based on the so-called Judgment of Paris will duke it out for attention this year. Bottle Shock, a rollicking comedy-drama based on true events that stars Alan Rickman, opens in Toronto on Aug. 6 and is slated to roll out to theatres across the country later in the summer. The second film, Judgment of Paris, based on the official story by the only journalist to attend the Paris tasting, Time magazine's George Taber, is due later this year.
The event's significance has predictably been interpreted the same way ever since: California had vaulted its way into the wine stratosphere. True. But if there's justice, the films will also be a reminder - in these boom times for wine snobbery - of a message far more overdue.
Lost in the nationalistic dustup was a collateral truth merely implied by Mr. Taber's news story and deliciously hinted at in the great climax scene of Bottle Shock.
The message? Without the benefit of a glance at the label, wine connoisseurship is so much hot air and bluster.
I've seen Bottle Shock, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it's well worth the price of a decent bottle of Gallo chardonnay. Filmed almost entirely in California, it's a sort of Rocky-with-grapes tale about the buildup to the Paris tasting at one winery, Chateau Montelena, which supplied the winning chardonnay. Mr. Rickman's understated portrayal of Steven Spurrier, the upper-crust Brit who organized the tasting and travels to California to source the U.S. entries personally, is something to behold, even if a few of the other performances run more toward typical Hollywood caricature.
One might ask why two films would suddenly materialize more than three decades after the fact. No doubt a big reason is Sideways, the 2004 sleeper hit from director Alexander Payne that proved pinot noir could be gold at the box office.
Another is the 2005 book Judgment of Paris by Mr. Taber, Time magazine's former Paris correspondent.
In fact, though credit for masterminding American wine's pivotal historical moment has always gone to Mr. Spurrier, perhaps an equally critical player was Mr. Taber, whose initiative on what he calls in his book "an otherwise slow afternoon" ensured that the low-key tasting did not fade into obscurity.
"Americans abroad have been boasting for years about California wines, only to be greeted in most cases by polite disbelief - or worse," he wrote in the article published June 7, 1976. "Last week in Paris, at a formal wine tasting organized by Spurrier, the unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul."
That last line became the enduring message of the event, of course - the Eagle had landed on the wine map.
But as Mr. Taber also entertainingly observed, it wasn't just that the French judges clearly preferred two California wines to the rest. Some actually believed they were tasting France's mythical terroir - the unique soil composition and special microclimates of its famous vineyards - in the rookie cowboy juice from Napa.
"Ah, back to France!" said one judge upon sipping a Napa chardonnay.
"That is definitely California. It has no nose," said another after downing the Ramonet-Prudhon Bâtard-Montrachet 1973, a top-ranked white Burgundy, which placed seventh out of 10 chardonnays.
