Napa will always have Paris

By now, many wine enthusiasts have headed to the theater to watch "Bottle Shock," the movie about the 1976 tasting in Paris that launched Napa wines to international recognition.

The Paris tasting has gone down in history as The Judgment of Paris among wine aficionados, the coming of age of an American industry, long dismissed by Europeans as an effort in futility by American dilettantes.

Embodying this attitude, France-based wine merchant Stephen Spurrier, played by a gently comic Alan Rickman, arrives in Napa Valley.

Spurrier, driving a battered Gremlin, enters with little style or fanfare, annoying American vintners along the way as he tastes what California has to offer, taking the best with him back to Paris.

Here, he has set up a blind tasting among French experts, with a magazine writer on hand to proclaim the results to the world.

Could it be that Napa Valley might actually produce a wine, any wine, to compare with the centuries of greatness from Bordeaux or Burgundy?

History tells us that it can -- and "Bottle Shock" gives us the story, good wine information poured out in measured doses, beautiful cinematography and plenty of tension.

The actual tasting, happening toward the end of the movie, is almost an afterthought -- and we'd have it no other way. The hard work in the vineyards, the financial struggles of the farmers in the Napa Valley of the day, had already taken place.

How important, though, was the Paris tasting to the American wine industry, looking back more than three decades?

We asked wine expert Woody De Luna of Republic Distributing and Texas winemaker Richard Becker for their perspectives. Both sat on a 1984 panel at the New World Wine & Food Festival that re-created the tasting and again found the Californian wines superior.

Becker related a story about the 1976 tasting that he heard from Robert Mondavi and that is included in the film: "At the end of the first pass of the white wines, the judges said, 'This is a waste of our time. It's obvious the French wines are far superior."' They did the same with the reds. And they were wrong on both counts.

"What's not too well known is that the French hosted a second tasting in 1986, and the results were the same: The Californians won again," Becker said. "After that Robert Mondavi said, 'That will be the end of blind tastings by the French judges."'

The initial tasting had a tremendous impact on the owner of Becker Vineyards. The judges' decision was that "you can make wonderful wine anywhere," he said.

It's the reason Becker called one of his wines Iconoclast, though the name takes the challenge one step further.

"We wanted to break that icon that only good wines can come from France and California," he said.

De Luna concurred. "The 1976 Paris tasting changed the world of wine for the better. It not only signaled the arrival of the New World of wine in the form of superb California chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, but it was in many ways responsible for the French improving their wines. With international competition, French wines had to strive to be the best they could be as opposed to simply resting on their laurels," he said.

De Luna admitted to being a "confirmed Francophile" when it comes to wine, though he made exceptions for his "beloved German rieslings."

"I am very grateful that it is now a relatively rare occurrence to come across a mid- to top-level French wine with serious faults," de Luna said.