Hollywood goes nose to nose over French wine's darkest moment

[José]

Hollywood goes nose to nose over French wine's darkest moment

Rival films to tell tale of 1976 tasting when classics were humbled by the New World

Kim Willsher in Paris

Wednesday August 1, 2007

The Guardian

It was a calamity for French viticulture - and it sparked a wine war that rages even to this day.

In 1976 a group of 11 distinguished wine experts were asked to compare some of France's finest wines with some little-known California bottles in a blind test. At the time it was carved in stone that France produced the best wines in the world.

When the unthinkable happened and every one of the judges - nine of them French - awarded top marks to the American wines, the reaction brought a whole new meaning to the phrase grapes of wrath. Three decades on, French viticulture has never completely recovered and some in France still find the event too painful to discuss.

Now the tasting is the reason behind another round of bloodletting, this time over two rival Hollywood films - one starring British actor Alan Rickman - that are being made about the legendary judgment.

At the time the French cried foul, dismissed the result as a fluke and declaring that anyone who knew anything knew as a matter of fact and instinct that French wines were better than California wines. The British wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who had organised the competition, was shunned as an agent of perfidious Albion, while the Gallic tasters received hate mail for "letting France down".

Mr Spurrier is involved in the so-called "official" version of the event, a film called Judgment of Paris based on a book by Time journalist George Taber, the only reporter present at the tasting. Mr Spurrier has accused the producers of a rival movie, entitled Bottle Shock and starring Rickman as Mr Spurrier and Danny DeVito as Mike Grgich, a celebrated Californian winemaker whose Napa Valley Chardonnay triumphed in the 1976 tasting, of "defamation and gross misinterpretation".

Having read the script Mr Spurrier is reportedly outraged that he is being portrayed as an "impossibly effete snob" and says the portrayal of his character is "deeply insulting". He has now written to the Bottle Shock producers threatening to sue and demanding that his name is excised from the story.

"There is hardly a word that is true in the script and many, many pure inventions as far as I am concerned," Mr Spurrier said in Decanter magazine, where he works as consultant editor.

Mr Spurrier, who organised a re-run of the tasting - with the same results - last year, added that some "if not all" representations of him in the rival film are "false, defamatory and disparaging", and show him in a "false light".

"It's absolute rubbish the way they portray me. I'm supposed to have employees I never had, been in places I've never been, borrowed money from banks I never borrowed," he said yesterday. "I've had my name taken off the script and I hope that if they make the film it will be as fiction rather than a true story."

The American production company making the official Judgment of Paris, which owns the rights to Mr Spurrier's story, is also considering suing the rival production.

Mr Spurrier, who was 34 at the time of the original tasting, said the production company had mooted some big names to play his character. "I said I wanted an English actor and they suggested Hugh Grant, but I said he's too old. They said Jude Law, I said too beautiful."

Other Hollywood leading men, including George Clooney and Keanu Reeves, have been suggested for major supporting roles.

Bottle Shock, which is currently being filmed, is due for release next year. Both films are hoping to cash in on the success of 2005's wine-themed Oscar winner Sideways. Nadine Jolson, a spokesman for Bottle Shock, said the film was about a historical event "and nobody owns the rights to that".

The infamous Paris tasting took place on May 24, 1976 in the covered terrace at the Intercontinental hotel. Mr Spurrier, who owned a small wine shop in the centre of the city and a wine school next door, wanted to draw attention to some exceptional wines from California, then unknown in Paris. He brought together a panel of judges, including Odette Kahn, editor of La Revue de Vin de France, a top sommelier and the owner of one France's top restaurants.

"It was an absolutely impeccable range of tasters. My intention was simply to draw attention to these new wines but I realised the only way to persuade them to taste them was to do it blind and say there were benchmarks of French wine in there," said Mr Spurrier.

He pitted premier and first cru Burgundy wines and grand and premier cru Bordeaux wines against Californian Chardonnay and Cabernet. "I had rigged the whole thing for the French to win. You don't take half a dozen unknown Californian wines and put them up the very best of French wine," he said.

Mr Spurrier said the French judges had treated the tasting as an intellectual exercise with only one outcome.

"They were saying things like "this is rather rich, it must be Californian", when it was a French wine, and they gave top marks to a wine convinced it was French. When they found out it wasn't there was general consternation," he said. "One of the judges wanted her notes back to change them, then wrote an article saying I had rigged the tasting, but the other testers were all very gentlemanly.

"What we showed in 1976 was that the Californian wines were better than the best French wines. It was a wake-up call to French winemakers. Sadly, it is a wake-up call they didn't heed."

A taste of the future

The 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting still has the French spluttering with indignation. Not only did a handful of then relatively obscure wines from California trounce the greatest names in France, but they did so in a blind tasting organised by an Englishman, in Paris, with a panel of judges including highly respected French wine trade luminaries.

Thirty years on denial still clouds the French viewpoint, but the Paris tasting proved pivotal for the confidence of New World wines. Americans began to buy top-end California wines and the concept of collectable "blue chip" wines emerged as select estates ratcheted up the price on their small batches of wine.

And Paris almost certainly proved the spur for the seminal Mondavi-Rothschild joint venture in 1979 that saw the creation of Opus One, forerunner of a host of similar high-profile Gallic-New World winemaking projects.

What began as "a fairly run-of-the-mill tasting" helped fuel the global rise in quality and diversity we see today. And, although our Gallic neighbours would never admit it, this rivalry has driven the quality of France's wines to new heights.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2138929,00.html

[Punu]

C'est vrai, les vins français sont généralement mauvais (ils goûtent le vinaigre).