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Learn to COOK - Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $13.82
Your Save: $ 1.18 ( 8% )
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Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.22094436109047
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2006-11-21
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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Told for the first time by the only reporter present, this is the true story of the legendary Paris Tasting of 1976 -- a blind tasting where French judges shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France's best -- and its revolutionary impact on the world of wine. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History houses, amid its illustrious artifacts, two bottles of wine: a 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay. These are the wines that won at the now-famous Paris Tasting in 1976, where a panel of top French wine experts compared some of France's most famous wines with a new generation of California wines. Little did they know the wine industry would be completely transformed as a result, sparking a golden age for viticulture that extends beyond France's hallowed borders -- to Australia, Chile, South Africa, New Zealand, and across the globe. Then Paris correspondent for Time magazine, George M. Taber recounts this seminal contest and its far-reaching effects, focusing on the three gifted unknowns behind the winning wines: a college lecturer, a real estate lawyer, and a Yugoslavian immigrant. At a time when California was best known for cheap jug wine, these pioneers used radical new techniques alongside time-honored winemaking traditions to craft premium American wines that could stand up to France's finest. With unique access to the main players and a contagious passion for his subject, Taber renders this historic event and its tremendous aftershocks in captivating prose, bringing to life an eclectic cast and magnificent settings. For lovers of wine and anyone who enjoys a story of the entrepreneurial spirit of the new world conquering the old, this is an illuminating and deeply satisfying tale.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: California wines recognized worldwide
Comment: This is a superb first hand account of the event that shook the wine world and turned it upside down; California wines came out on top and the wine world has never been the same since. This book is much more than a story about the event, it is a mini-history of California wine making, from the growth of small vineyards with limited production into the multi-billion dollar global business that it has become. With the California wines winning the tasting by getting the higher marks, California was thrust into the forfront surpassing the once highly regarded French wines. This competition changed everything as the California wine business began it's boom that continues to grow. As I said, it is more than a story of the competition, it is a story about the people behind the wine industry, the people who take the time to achieve world class wine, the people driven by devotion to producing the best. The book goes back in time to examine the early wine makers influence on that day in Paris. This is a great story with excellent mini-biographies, especially if you are a wine enthusiast. Recommended reading for anyone interested in the California wine industry.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book on Wine
Comment: Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine
Ordered this book after seeing the movie "Bottle Shock" this is so much more interesting. The movie was cute but a bit stupid ... The book is great with lots of real history and technical info. on wine that I find facinating.
Customer Rating:
Summary: California vs France: The ultimate wine tasting competition
Comment: Taber, a writer for Time Magazine when he observed the competition in 1976, pulls the story threads together in a mesmerizing tale of personalities, chardonnays and cabernets
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Summary: Best History of California Winemaking
Comment: I bought this book thinking is was all about the 1976 Tasting in Paris but it turns out that this book is really the history of California Winemaking and all of the characters that have put California Wines where they are today. For the lover of California wines, this is a must read. Once you start reading, you can't put it down.
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Summary: "I Was There" Book About The Wine World's Tasting Heard 'Round the World
Comment: After far too many ghastly vintages from 1963 - 1974, and with the quality of backward French winemaking going unchallenged, the victory of New World California wines over their prestigious French counterparts in 1976 was, in hindsight, no surprise. Yet it was as great a shock to the French wine world as the collapse of the Maginot Line was to the French military establishment in May 1940. Unlike Andre Maginot, who never lived to see the tragic consequences of his and France's folly, French wine's top champions faced choosing between unbearable humiliation or dismissing the results as an aberration.
"Time" journalist George Taber, who had the wine scoop of the century and to his credit knew what to do with it, here returns to his moment in the sun, developing the storyline into a full book. He chronicles the persons who were at the tasting and who were most impacted by the results. Taber reveals their ongoing struggle absorbing the unthinkable, whether for the winning Californians, who at the time made up the new wave within their own industry and were given a grand opportunity; or in the case in France, where no such young wine Turks had credibility, and the fall out from the tasting was an unacknowledged PR nightmare. Unable to accept the cultural implications, many French refused to countenance the results - indeed at the actual tasting one desperate taster tried rewriting votes! To this day there exist Europeans who adamantly look down their - often Gallic - noses at wine from outside Europe. Yet increasingly, along with the tired fruit of those aging Bordeaux wines, such chauvinism more and more fades from respectable wine debate. Winemaking has moved a long way from the crude days of Napoleonic Minister of the Interior Chaptal's policy of using the French sugar beet crop for 'improving' the country's wines.
This book's major focus is humans, not the wines; Taber discusses the repercussions of the tasting far more than the actual event, though the curious secondary stories leading up to the tasting receive the sort of attention usually saved for more serious historical moments. The larger themes - of not resting on your laurels, and the facades that can be the reality of institutional image - emerge with an inexorable - and some might say, overdue - inevitability.
Perhaps it was fated these two birthplaces of democracy, France and America, should be the players in this most democratic-driven event: a blind tasting. (Lady Justice - by contrast - keeps one eye open just to avoid such unacceptabe results, and since the tasting any number of European wine advocates have sympathized and even embraced such a fallback.) Not surprising, too, that the more capitalist country and can-do Americans should triumph over the less egalitarian 'old world' of the more rigid and stratified hierachical universe of French wine estates, with their aristocratic trappings.
Complacency and arrogance are poor resources to contest with - and the French wine world got their ears boxed for just such attitudes. Instead of pulling out all the stops and setting bottles of '59 Lafite or perhaps a '61 Latour-a-Pomerol against the California cabs, or demanding the tasting include pinot noir, which conveniently was omitted because California didn't produce quality pinot noir, the French were snookered into permitting others a say in 'setting the table'. Prejudice and ignorance, kissing cousins of the small-minded and snobbish, got their comeuppance, and the French were hoisted by their own petard. Which in plain language means they foolishly set off the equivalent of a wooden wine crate bursting with gunpowder under their own carefully inscribed world of carefully controlled classes and prices. Generally unfamiliar with blind tasting's pecularities, where fruit and alcohol can trump more subtle qualities, the French tasters naively presumed an expertise they did not possess in comparing varietal wines from differing regions. They were blindsided. Almost none of the tasters had any idea which was domestic wine and which California wine. (Oddly enough, when the tasting was retried ten years later in America, the American tasters could not separate the wines by country.)
Recently the tasting was redone. Once again the French showed they haven't learned very much. French chardonnays, which from great vintages and the best sites can age and develop, were dropped. Once again pinot noir was absent. Chateau Haut-Brion refused to participate, but could not stop the tasting from buying examples of its wine in the marketplace. (Those evil entrepeneurs!) The original losing Bordeaux were trotted out again on the ignorant myth, long disproved by modern enology, that somehow wines with no great fruit when young would suddenly find some after twenty years of aging! The better made and fruitier California wines swept to total victory, sweeping the top placements. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
History was at work here. Yet this sort of challenge was not new for the California winemakers; for many decades avant-garde California wine makers, ambitious to compete with the very best, had been holding such tastings at home, measuring their Chardonnays against Puligny-Montrachets, Chassagne-Montrachets and Meursaults; while judging their best Cabernets against Pauillacs, St.Juliens, and Margaux. In the early seventies the influential English wine writer Harry Waugh, with an impeccable understanding of European wine, published a series of highly impressed tasting notes on these new esoteric California wines he had tasted in travels to California. A small handful of California's newest enologists were experimenting with a variety of new processes, especially in maintaining a wine's fruit. Now obscured, but then still potent icons for young winemakers, were extraordinary wines made by a few legendary wine-makers, such as Andre Tchelistcheff and the extraordinary Martin Ray. (You can read about Ray's colorful career in: Vineyards in the Sky: The Life of Legendary Vintner Martin Ray Those of us who tasted the best wines made by Tcheslistcheff and Ray were perfectly aware of just how good the best California wines could be.
Thus the potential for great wine in California was largely proven long before the '76 tasting - what needed to change was a scaling up so that more great wine could be produced, and this in fact was already well under way. By the the time the French were sitting around dishing the Paris Tasting results California was already bottling the watershed Cabernet vintage of 1974.
Talent's book makes stimulating reading for more than just wine snobs - what's in play here are larger issues, common throughout all levels of society.
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