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.

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.

The arrived in great shape and in a timely fashion. I highly recommend this provider.

As a life-long wine lover, especially of California wines, this was a revelation. I especially enjoyed the background of how these winemakers came to CA -- the CA wine history, plus the French history, all leading up to the event make for a terrific thriller.

I thoroughly enjoyed Judgment of Paris which was given to be by my daughter for Christmas in 2007 knowing my fondness for wine. It is a wonderfully readable history of winemaking and the vintners of Napa Valley.Iloved the descriptions of the various "characters" that are at the heart of the success of Napa wines. I also enjoyed the discussion of the newer technology and approaches. I've already given several copies to other friends. It reads best with a glass of good Napa wine so that one can savor both the history and the current performance.

This book is a flat out excellent page turner as it goes through the general histories of the regions and winemakers involved, the competition in Paris, and the aftermath of the `surprising' wins by the California wines. Highly recommended.

Then Taber spends the last 20% of his book looking at a few wineries in a few wine regions around the world, and an update on the French and Napa regions since the competition in 1976. This all seems like incongruous useless filler to get the book from 240 pages to 300.

Five stars for the first 80%, none for the last 20%.

A delightful read for any true wine aficionado, and a must for any would-be-wine-snob, this book is filled with facts that entertain and educate!

Mr. Taber takes the reader inside the wine world with respect to judging, production and history. At The Berwick Wine Company we have made this required reading as it personalizes the winemakers and creators of the wine world. The reader should also note the difficulty in judging wine, which has
only become more difficult as the critics pull the terrior out of the vineyard forcing winemakers to stylize their wine for the export markets.

This is a good history of the California wines and the forces that made them. It leads up to the 1976 Paris Tasting that compared some California wines to some French wines - it gives all of the background to the wines involved, as well as the people. It is written by the one reporter that was actually present at the tasting. The book describes how this was a turning point in the development of international wines and the resulting impact.

Unfortunately it does not stop there. It then tries to give an update on the current state of international wines, and thus rather than a book about a point in time, which would remain timeless, puts itself at a point in time (2004/5)looking at the wine landscape, and thus becomes dated.

Received this book as a gift and was surprised how much information in contained in such an easy, interesting format. If you have vaguely remember something about American wines doing well in a French Venue, this is the book that will explain it all. The book goes further than the Paris Tasting and explores how the wine business has expanded world wide.

Most wine books are for reference, being about a region or a producer, or a collection of tasting notes. This book tells a story, and it's the best such wine book I've ever read. Campbell Mattison's "Wine Hunter" is also a good book but "Judgment of Paris" is less sentimental, and much broader in scope.

I already knew about the 1976 tasting and had recently read the Decanter coverage of the rematch 20 years later. In spite of this I still found the book interesting.

I seldom drink Californian wine, little of the good stuff makes its way outside of the USA and it is usually far overpriced. But still I found the book interesting.

It's more than a book about the 1976 tasting and how it came about and what happened. It tells the story of the creation of many of the Californian vineyards, winemakers, and specific wines that ended up in the tasting. But the book is more than this. George Taber is a former Time staff writer (who was living in France in 1976 and was the only journalist at the tasting) and his global perspective shows. He covers the implications of the tasting for California and for all of the New World, and for France too.

So I recommend this book not only to those interesting in fine wine but also to wine marketers.

Thankfully the book is absolutely not a rah rah we beat the French jingoistic celebration. Taber correctly points out that the facts that show that it's a stretch of the data to say that the Californian wines beat the French ones (especially amongst the Cabernets), the more correct summary is that it showed they were very competitive. Which is quite amazing given the youth of the vines, winemakers and general US wine industry. I hadn't realised that many of the wines were from such new operations.

Today it seems less of a story that very expensive Napa wines are competitive with very expensive French ones, but then there was a price difference and a huge perceptual one.

I was intrigued to read that even back in 1976 many of the winemakers of the `Judgment of Paris' wines were deliberately making wines in a different style to their neighbours. They were seeking elegance and balance, low alcohol wines, that were food friendly. They were quality obsessed and many of them were Francophiles when it came to their taste in wine. Of course, this is partly why the english Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher chose them for the tasting.

I do wonder if these winemakers are still making wines along these lines, or whether they have bowed to the pressure from the Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate (which must be much stronger pressure on US wines that depend on US drinkers than on French winemakers) and upped their alcohol levels and sweetness ?