It was 1976, the Concord had been in service exactly four months, the space shuttle Enterprise was first rolled out in sands of Southern California’s desert and across the Atlantic in Paris, France 11 men sat down to drink wine. It was in the late afternoon at the end of May when Steven Spurrier, an Englishman who hung his shingle in Paris as a wine merchant counted the scores and revealed where the best wine in the world was made: Napa Valley, California.
In celebration of the release of director Randall Miller’s upcoming movie
Bottle Shock, Strange in San Francisco will venture across the Bay to the North and look at one of the strangest stories to come out of California’s then unknown wine country. On this day, on the verge of summer a blind taste test between the best wines of France’s most esteemed wine makers would be pitted against the best wines the upstart vintners in California could provide.
Now keep in mind that at this time, it was a known fact, unquestioned by the world that the best wines made on this Earth were made on French soil. The results of this tasting were a forgone conclusion to the point that the only member of the press to even show up was a reporter from Time, looking to fill a few paragraphs in the Modern Living section. So it is no stretch to imagine the pure shock that went through the wine making and consuming world when the judge’s totals put the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet at the top of the list.
It is rare in the history when there is a massive paradigm shift in world thought, when a single moment can directly alter the course of the world in any noticeable or dramatic way. Most moments come and go with little notice, often compiled into great volumes of moments and called “events”. Most events get duly noted and only when combined with many other such events they are called “trends” and considered an element of change. Most notable events are just that, notations of something that is bigger, bolder, stronger or more amazing then other similar events in a greater trend, pointed to as an example or an abnormality but not as the cause for change. The “birth” of the internet, possibly the event that changed mankind the most in the last 50 years was not an event, but a process, a trend that spanned decades, only changing the world as a whole in the late 1990s.
The tasting in Paris on the other hand was a single event, one moment. Before reading the winner, the world was at peace, everyone knew France made the best wines, and all others were swill. By the end of the word cellars, the whole world had changed. France no longer held corner on what could be known as “good” wine and across the globe; vintners began to see conditions just right for growing all over the world. Now, more than 30 years after that moment, there are great wines made in every corner of the world, all one needs are the right soils, good climate and some grapes on the vine.
The movie,
Bottle Shock hits theaters August 6th in select cities.
