The Judgment of Paris
How one blind tasting in a Paris hotel, and the winemakers behind two Napa Valley wines, changed how the world saw California wine forever.
By the 1960s, Napa Valley had spent a generation quietly rebuilding after Prohibition, the Depression, and a war -- respected locally, but still an afterthought on the world wine stage. Two things changed that for good: a winery that opened in 1966 with almost reckless ambition, and a blind tasting a decade later that no one, least of all the Americans who entered it, expected to win. What happened in a Paris hotel conference room on a spring afternoon in 1976 is still the single most consequential afternoon in Napa Valley's history.
The Modern Revival
The turning point came in 1966, when Robert Mondavi opened the first major new winery built in Napa Valley since Prohibition, shortly after a highly publicized falling-out with his brother Peter at the family's Charles Krug Winery. Mondavi's ambition was explicit and, at the time, widely seen as unrealistic: to make American wine that could stand next to the finest wines of France. He invested in new winemaking technology, championed varietal labeling over generic names borrowed from European regions like "Chablis" and "Burgundy," and spent years promoting Napa Valley on the world stage before the world was fully paying attention. His winery did not just add one more name to the valley's map -- it signaled that Napa Valley intended to compete at the highest level, and it helped draw a new generation of ambitious winemakers, including two who would soon make history of their own, into the valley behind him.
The Tasting Nobody Expected to Win
Ten years later, in May 1976, Napa Valley's new ambition was tested in the last place anyone expected: a hotel conference room in Paris. British wine merchant Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher, director of his Academie du Vin, organized a blind tasting to mark the American Bicentennial, pitting a handful of California wines against some of France's most decorated labels. Nine French judges -- wine educators, sommeliers, winemakers, and critics, several of them among the most respected names in French wine -- tasted blind, unaware which wines were which as they scored.
In the white wine category, a 1973 Chardonnay made by winemaker Mike Grgich at Chateau Montelena, a winery near Calistoga at the valley's northern end, outscored top white Burgundies from some of France's most storied producers. In the red category, a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, made by founder and winemaker Warren Winiarski on a stretch of volcanic hillside known as the Stags Leap District, took first place ahead of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Chateau Haut-Brion, two of Bordeaux's most celebrated estates. Other California wines in the tasting, including entries from Ridge Vineyards, Mayacamas, Clos Du Val, Heitz Cellars, and Freemark Abbey, placed respectably alongside them.
The judges had no idea they had just rewritten the story of American wine. A single reporter from Time magazine happened to be in the room, and the results made international headlines within days. The event was later nicknamed the Judgment of Paris, and it did more for Napa Valley in one afternoon than the previous hundred years had managed: it proved, beyond argument, that Napa Valley could make wine as good as anywhere on Earth.
Napa Valley Today
The decades since the Judgment of Paris have been Napa Valley's fastest growth by far. The valley became the United States' second federally recognized American Viticultural Area in 1981, and between 1983 and 2024 winemakers and growers carved out seventeen smaller sub-appellations within it, each reflecting a distinct pocket of soil and climate -- several of them, including Stags Leap District and Oakville, now as recognizable to wine drinkers as the valley itself. Investment poured in: new wineries, better vineyard science, ambitious architecture. Napa Valley grew from a few dozen wineries in the years after Prohibition to more than 475 today, most still family-owned, carrying forward names like Krug, Beringer, and Mondavi alongside hundreds of newer ones. What began with a single vineyard planted by George Yount in the 1830s is now one of the most visited and most decorated wine regions on Earth.