40th anniversary worth celebrating: Wine world's 'Judgment of Paris'

Forty years ago this week, the wine world was shocked — shocked! — and rocked by upsets from upstarts. At a blind tasting in Paris, two California wines beat the best that Bordeaux and Burgundy had to offer.

Sacré bleu!

It got little attention at the time — basically a blurb by Time magazine's George M. Taber — but the triumph of a Chateau Montelena chardonnay and a Stag's Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon was a game-changer, an immeasurable boost to a nascent wine industry that has done nothing but grow and thrive in the intervening years.

World-class wine already was being made in California — I recently tasted a sublime 1966 Charles Krug Cabernet — but most of the wine-buying public didn't know it. "Not bad for kids from the sticks," quipped Montelena owner Jim Barrett at the time.

So what became known as the "Judgment of Paris" provided not only consumer acceptance but also the impetus for growers and vintners to basically say, "Hey, we can really do this."

Over the ensuing decade, Minnesota native Robert Mondavi became the face of Napa wine, and Twin Cities native Al Brounstein's Diamond Creek became the first California winery to crest the $100-a-bottle mark. By the mid-1980s, thanks to legwork by the likes of brokers such as David Ready, California wines had a major presence on store shelves and restaurant lists here in the heartland.

Bigger changes were in the offing. The folks at Bordeaux's prestigious Chateau Mouton-Rothschild tacitly acknowledged California's potential by aligning with Mondavi to form Opus One. These days, you can't throw a grape in Napa without hitting a transplanted French vintner.

"We started making wine for tasting and not for dinner," said Christopher Howell, winemaker at Cain in Napa. "A lot of Americans like to drink wines as a cocktail."

A 1991 "60 Minutes" report by the late Morley Safer examined what was called "the French paradox," noting that people in France had markedly lower rates of heart disease than Americans despite — or is it because of? — their predilections for cheese and wine. U.S. consumption of wine spiked immediately, and scarcely has waned since.

About two-thirds of wine now sold in this country comes from domestic producers, a figure that would have been unfathomable 40 years ago. Most but not all the bottles, kegs and boxes are from California, as wine now is made in each of the other 49 states (yes, even South Dakota and Alaska have wineries).

A recent book, Dan Dunn's rollicking "American Wino: A Tale of Reds, Whites, and One Man's Blues," sets out to understand how fermented grape juice has evolved from sea to shining sea since 1976. He doles out major praise for the Marquette grape, created by the University of Minnesota, and he comes to an interesting conclusion:

"At least right now, they're not making wine anywhere in the United States better than California. Forty years from now? Things are going to look a whole lot different."

For starters, many vintners have scaled back on the oak and the alcohol these days, crafting wines with clarity and precision. Newbies such as Matthiasson and Leviathan have joined holdovers Cain, Corison, Frog's Leap and others in producing lower-alcohol gems in Napa. Some of these wines even approach the 12 percent level that I relished in that insanely good '66 Charles Krug.

Meanwhile, many operations still favoring the large-and-in-charge style have made refinements in the vineyard and winery to produce stellar offerings.

Which means there's something for everyone: those who favor the kinds of wines that won the "Judgment of Paris" and the folks who want oomph above all else — and everyone in between.