Rival "Judgment of Paris" films spark controversy

I got the Taber book when it appeared. It's been said online, flippantly, that Taber built a whole career around the 1976 tasting. This book, anyway, fails to support such a notion.

It's a broad-based look at evolution of the international wine industry, and especially California, employing the 1976 Spurrier tasting as a fulcrum or focal point. (Even more so than, for example, Barnaby Conrad's 1988 absinthe book is mostly about broader cultural and historical subjects with absinthe as the common connection.)

...California wine didn't have that high a profile even in California

... In 1976, I was living in California ... there was little awareness of California wines

I gather you folks were going to the wrong restaurants!

Of course California is diverse and large (some 405,000 square km; compare United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland at 244,000) with far-flung population centers. Therefore, your California may not be my California.

But why (on earth) point to a wine list from a Nevada tourist casino, rather than from California restaurants favored by locals? In the SF-Bay area in 1976, that might include the Blue Fox, Narsai's, Chez Panisse, etc., and good neighborhood places of lower profile.

A Narsai's 1978 menu (singly-folded light card stock, net 12 x 18 inches or 30 x 45 cm) shows food on the front, wines on the inside pages, in fine print. These include 91 California varietal wines from such (already) well-known labels as Beaulieu, Chateau Montelena, Cakebread, Heitz, Kenwood, Louis Martini, Mirassou, Ridge, and Stag's Leap. (There's also a Corti Brothers Reserve Zinfandel* and the 1955 and 65 Inglenook Cabernets, $55 and $18 respectively.**) This is not even to mention incessant television ads I'd seen since the 1960s for the volume labels (Guild, Gallo, Italian Swiss Colony, etc.). Anyone who remembers these milieus would be surprised at the assertions quoted above. Hoke even saw the interest from Texas, half a continent away. (E.g. Dallas is 1741 miles, 2804 km, from SF.)

* The same well-known Corti Bros. whose famous food-wine shop recently opted out of high-alcohol wines, whereafter a wine forum host far away, criticizing the move, added that he knew a bit about the California wine scene but had never heard of these folks. A good example of argument by Well-*I*-Never-Heard-Of-That!

** From when Inglenook was a leading varietal winery, before sale and later reputation for dating-bar "Chablis." I tasted both '55 and '65 Cabernets in the early 1980s, thanks to a local friend who bought them on release. They were among the superb Cabernets of that era that made California's current reputation. In 1981, the '55 Inglenook became famous for selling at the highest auction price then recorded for a California wine.

...California wine didn't have that high a profile even in California

... In 1976, I was living in California ... there was little awareness of California wines

I gather you folks were going to the wrong restaurants!

But why (on earth) point to a wine list from a Nevada tourist casino, rather than from California restaurants favored by locals? In the SF-Bay area in 1976, that might include the Blue Fox, Narsai's, Chez Panisse, etc., and good neighborhood places of lower profile.

Why point to a Nevada tourist casino winelist? Because that is all I have. But who are the diners in a Reno casino of the late 1970's?? 99% Californians on vacation. This list was aimed at normal Americans out to have a good time and push to boat out in a night club show.

Sure there were good restaurants with good California wines featured, but the majority of restaurants that Iwent to had California wines as the house wine (under a European geographical name) and as a small section at the bottom headed 'Domestic'. We were eating in restaurants for lunch and dinner every day, so the restaurants were mostly everyday ones, not special event ones.

Randy R's memories match mine.

In 1976, I was living in California and had been for years. At that time, in decent restaurants I had experiences that included restaurant staff pouring red wine into a glass that had some white remaining, no one knowing what Cabernet Sauvignon was and a basic "Reuniti on ice" mentality.

One restaurant we ordered a Cal Cab Sauv (we only ever drank California wines when we there) and it came ice cold with ice encrusted around the neck. I asked the waitress if she had one that wasn'tf rozen and whe said tha tthe manager insisted that all the wines were kept cold, but she offered to put the bottle in the dishwasker for a while to warm it.

She did, and we enjoyed it.

Why point to a Nevada tourist casino winelist? Because that is all I have. ... We were eating in restaurants ...
Randy R's memories match mine.

Right, I've never meant to question that those were the sincere impressions of either of you. Only that these impressions don't support the sweeping characterizations posted here about the status of California wines in California in 1976, or match my somewhat longer experience, or that of most people I know who were paying attention to the scene at the time.

For more objective pictures, I'd refer any interested reader to the survey books of the milieu, such as the best-selling Thompson and Johnson California Wine Book (1976, ISBN 0688030874) or the UC-Press Book of California Wine (1984, ISBN 0520050851), standard references I've already mentioned here on this subject.

On the other hand, those impressions very accurately underline an issue generic to the US including California, then and now: that it is not traditionally a wine-drinking culture, and education about wine is needed. (Since 1976, if I remember the Wine Institute data, US has gone from average consumption about one-twelfth that of principal wine-drinking countries to about one-eighth, and this is not so much from everyone drinking a little more wine, as from some more people becoming regular wine drinkers.)

Watching wine in California continuously since 1976 I notice the similarities more than differences. There were plenty of wine geeks then (more now). Outstanding artisanal wines were made then (far more wines are made now, I wish the ratio of outstanding ones was still as high). Many restaurants were clueless about wines then, and many are still.

Watching wine in California continuously since 1976

This begs the question Max

Which question?

what part of California are you watching them from?

On that question, at this moment I'm watching them from silicon valley. But last week I was watching them (and posting here) from the Sierra Nevada range (home to a surprising amount of wine). I've also watched them a lot over the years from Mendocino County and (less often, but more intensely as some will tell you) from Amador, El Dorado, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Orange, Los Angeles, and Riverside Counties. Couldn't (alas) watch them from Trinity County because it seemed to have no wine scene whatever, the times I spent there ( 1976-78 ), at least in such towns as Peanut (pop. 7), Beegum (pop. 11), and Platina (pop. unknown)*. As a rule though, more in the SF Bay area than anywhere else.

Always room for wide experience here.

D'accord.

*Near there, off the paved road, was where I passed this badly-letterd sign: Driver: If Your THis far, Your Too far.

I think that's significant, Max. SF has always been more sophisticated dining wise than Orange County, which is where some of my worst wine experiences occurred.

Maybe so. Here we are comparing older to newer population centers. The greater SF area (roughly size of the Netherlands and about 160 years old) also has much younger subregions. They are less known for independent restaurants and more for chains.

Los Angeles also has a history of wine awareness (some of that is in the UC-Press book cited upthread) and is today one of the most active parts of the US for wine retailing and wine-hobby activities. It's also the area where some of the original 1970s-era consumer wine newsletters began.

After an interlude, here are excerpts of a recent movie note from a friend (both wine-literate and movie-literate) who warned some of us away from the now-released Bottle Shock. (This information came after I referred a wine group to the rival movies described earlier in this thread.)

I sincerely hope no one has parted with actual coin of the realm for Bottle shock.

I've never walked out on a movie (the entertainment equivalent, I suppose, of cleaning one's plate because people are starving in Europe), and until now there have only been 2-1/2 that I *wish* I'd walked out on: [sordid details omitted -- MH]. In other words, where entertainment's concerned, I'm so easy to please that it takes something sublimely wasteful to alienate me.

Until Bottle shock, which deserves 2-1/2 walkouts all to itself. How it's possible to waste, completely, four of the best actors working today -- Bill Pullman, Freddy Rodriguez, the underused and underrated Dennis Farina, and Alan RICKman for God's sake -- on a script so trite, contrived, cliched, hackneyed, unimaginative, lifeless, and deadly predictable, tarting up a story with so much inherent drama that it should have been a natural, and could have told itself effortlessly without any of the gratuitous crap they grafted onto it . . . well, how it's possible I'll never know, but the makers managed it in spades. They even managed to waste Eliza Dushku, while adding a "love interest" for the cipher of a protagonist who's a total zero on so many levels that saying 'bimbo' would be an insult to honest bimbos everywhere.

The worst of it is that if you'd told me all of this going into it, I wouldn't have been capable of believing it, and would have wasted my nine bucks anyway.

I saw it on the plane about three months ago and couldn't agree more. Absolutely awful, even by very low airplane movie standards.

I did not see Bottle Shock, because I enjoyed reading the Taber book so much. I also recall seeing a review of the film that started something like this:

The movie Bottle Shock got the following facts straight about the tasting event in 1976:

Napa is in California, and Paris is in France ...

.

When people ask me why I, an admitted wine enthusiast, did not see this movie, I simply give them that quote. Then we have a polite (or hearthy) laugh about it.

-- Clark

There's a currentt discussion about the film going on in the Friends & Fun forum -- viewtopic.php?f=14&t=22591