Judgment of Paris. Landmark 1976 blind tasting of French and Californian wines in which the nine judges, all of them French, voted a Napa Valley Chardonnay as the best of the whites and a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon as the best of the reds. The tasting, held in Paris and arranged by a young English wine-shop owner named Steven Spurrier, is considered the signal moment in which California wines “arrived,” thereby paving the way for the state’s oeno-industry boom, an explosion of boutique wineries with the gall to charge $60 for a Petite Syrah, and skyrocketing real-estate prices in Napa and Sonoma that forced locals who’d lived in those counties for generations to move elsewhere.
