Even for opera lovers, it promises to be an odd show. Next month’s Napa Valley Festival stages the premiere of a work bringing Bacchus and Venus to 1970s Paris and Napa, mythological heroes re-enacting the wine world’s most mythical tasting. The Judgment of Paris, the opera, is the latest re-telling of the celebrated 1976 tasting pitting Californian wines against Bordeaux’s most illustrious names. And while it surely can’t be artistically any worse than Bottle Shock, the 2008 comedy-drama telling the same tale (Alan Rickman played Steven Spurrier) it promises to be every bit as smugly tedious.

Last month brought a rash of such commemorations, prompted by 24 May’s 50th anniversary of the contest. You might have thought that after half a century, red-trousered wine merchants and writers would pipe down about it. You’d be wrong, because this is one of the few times they’ve ever impinged on popular consciousness (at least as represented by New York Times and Guardian readers) and they’re not letting us forget it.

I won’t deny the deliciousness of blazered Bordelais aristocrats and wine experts who’d never deigned to taste non-French wines being made to look silly. “Ah, back to France!” one judge reportedly exclaimed as he tasted a Napa Chardonnay. Judge Odette Kahn, then editor of La Revue du Vin de France, famously tried to get her scorecard back to hide the fact that she had ranked Stag’s Leap Cab 1973 and Mayacamas Vineyards Cab 1971 first and second, ahead of the likes of Châteaux Mouton-Rothschild and Haut-Brion. Though the French press avoided any mention of the event at the time, a few months later Le Figaro described the results as “laughable”. Except, unlike the Californians, they weren’t laughing.

In 1976 – especially for Time’s George Taber, the only reporter to attend – it was a great story. Fifty years on, even considering the wine world and its writers’ lack of news sense, not so much.  Regular re-enactments of the tasting since, using more mature vintages, haven’t revived its news value. And in part, this is simply because the Judgment of Paris changed so little.

Of course it was a boon to Californian wine. California’s industry in the early 1970s was still dominated by dire jug wines: Napa’s production of dry red wines overtook that of sweet ones only in the late 1960s. For the pioneers who triumphed in Paris, the effect was immediate. Soon after, Chateau Montelena winemaker Mike Grgich won backing to start his own Grgich Hills winery: years later, he told Business Week that “My life is divided into two parts – before the Paris tasting and after.” Elsewhere, the result put rockets under what was already a growing wave of investment: California’s land under vines tripled between 1964 and 1984.

Out in the rest of wine’s New World, there was no doubt some ripple effect. But not much: those countries and producers made their own luck. In Australia in the 1970s, technological innovations (especially temperature control) and changing domestic tastes were far more important that the Paris result. New Zealand had barely even begun planting yet. Argentina already had a substantial industry based on domestic consumption. Chile faced a crisis in domestic sales under Pinochet’s dictatorship, which it exported its way out of in the 1980s. South Africa’s industry remained cut off from the world by apartheid for years to come.

And back in Bordeaux, so dramatically humbled by Stag’s Leap et al? The Judgment of Paris had no impact at all. Indeed, powered by better winemaking techniques and, ironically, an American cheerleader, Robert Parker, Bordeaux’s elite scaled new heights of fame and wealth. The storied 1982 vintage both made Parker and marked the start of a new golden age for Bordeaux’s higher-end winemakers. From this point they were able to sell unfinished wine en primeur, such was the demand for it – an arrogant bit of cashflow management that most winemakers could only dream of getting away with. And far from shunning claret for homegrown stars, America accounted for up to 15% of 1980s Bordeaux exports.

Nor, except for Californian wines sold in the US, did the world beyond France make real inroads into the fine wine market in the following decades. In Australia, Henschke and Penfolds were already making iconic wines and forged their own path. In South America, premium fine-wine brands didn’t emerge until Concha y Toro’s Don Melchor (1987), with the likes of Seña, Almaviva and Cheval des Andes following a decade or more later.

Indeed in 2000, when former stockbrokers James Miles and Justin Gibbs launched Liv-ex, Bordeaux remained commercially the only fine-wine game in town. Liv-Ex’s benchmark Fine Wine 50 index continues to track only the most heavily-traded fine wines: Bordeaux First Growths. Even in 2010, Bordeaux represented 95% of the global secondary fine-wine market. Aside from a handful of Piemonte and Tuscan stars and scattered curiosities (Tokaj, Vega Sicilia), few non-French wines disturbed the fine-wine lists of St James’s Street. So much for Paris 1976.

There has indeed been a vinous revolution in the past 15 years: partly thanks to the sea change in wine quality around the world since the turn of the century – and in part because of Bordeaux’s hubris. A combination of economic crises and the greed of the top châteaux has brought the en primeur system to the brink of collapse. The consensus at this point seems to be that this year’s campaign isn’t as disastrous as 2025’s. But as Wine-Searcher reported last week, “Bordeaux [retail] prices are dropping dramatically” in the US. Today the region represents only around a third of the global secondary fine-wine market.

The Judgment of Paris was a vital moment for Californian wine. But it made little difference to anyone else – least of all the merchants and auction houses poised to make a bigger killing than ever in Bordeaux. We all love a plucky upstart’s moment of glory. But ultimately, as in society at large, the red trousers won – which is why they celebrate it.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
 
Andrew Neather blogs at https://aviewfrommytable.substack.com/