Judgement of Paris with Sir Peter Michael, Steven Spurrier and Gary Myatt

Judgement of Paris video.In 1976, in small room in a Paris hotel, a strange thing happened.

Something that changed a centuries-old status quo and rocked the ‘civilised’ world to it’s roots.

In a blind tasting with some of the leading French wine aficionados of the day, Californian wines were chosen over France’s very best. Big names were knocked right out of the park in a comprehensive whooping.

it’s about a really dramatic story that
took place in france
in 1976 and it’s a story which is
really well known in america it’s very
well known
but has been suppressed in france and
has not been told at all
in the uk it’s about really
an article that was placed in time
magazine
by a guy called george tabor
who attended this famous tasting
and he had the brilliant idea
of saying this was the judgment of paris
and it was the judgment put together by
steven spurrier an englishman living in
paris on the right bank
i had a wine shop in the middle of paris
which i
bought in 1971 and subsequently
i took over the place next door and
opened a wine school academy devon which
was the first private wine school
in france we became a center
point for california visiting california
vintners
and for american wine writers like
alexis best beloved
robert finnegan and and so i began to be
exposed to california wine and i was
astounded
on the quality of particularly the
chardonnays and the cabernet sauvignons
and so my partner in the wine school was
an american girl called patricia
gallagher and she had some vacation
in september 75 and i said look we
should go to california
check it out and if you think the wines
is really as good as the wines we’ve
been shown
we’ll heard a tasting and so she came
back raving about the wines
and so we put in the groundwork
for the tasting i wanted to put the
wines in front of a panel of
experts so that i would at least
get the best opinion in france um
so we had pierre terry whose chatterjee
score in bordeaux over development
mandela romney county and burgundy
jean-claude vino at the restaurant i
live on
roman oliver the restaurant on the
ground very far um
odette khan the owner of the rude van
france our panel of nine people was
totally impeccable
and it was only about a week before the
tasting
i realized that just to give them a
tasting of california wines
would not achieve what i wanted because
i wanted recognition of the quality of
california wines
and so my conclusion was even though
in the best world of the world they
would have liked to appreciate the
california wines
they would have known that california is
somewhere north of mexico
and they would have treated these
california wines rather like something
from southern spain
so the only way i could get an
independent opinion was to do a blind
tasting
with the best wines from bordeaux and
the best wines from burgundy
what happened here unexpectedly and
shockingly
was that both the white wine
and the red wine were chosen as
from california what i was after was
recognition
recognition for california wine and
because george taper
of time magazine was there he was doing
a wine course at my wine school
and he wrote it up in time magazine the
judgment of paris
and at that point there was no way that
anyone could stop
the publicity so the publicity began
and it was the first in the
wall of french supremacy in wine
it was a shock and there was a movie
made
called bottle shock which is a double
entendre
it certainly caused a riot in
in paris and le mans had precious little
to say to it
there was another repeat tasting because
when it was discovered that the french
wines had come quite a long way down the
list
a number of comments were made one of
them was
well of course wines from california
mature earlier than those from france
try it in 10 20 30 years time
and 30 years later well in fact in 10
years and 30 years later
mr spurrier decided he would do it again
and i was at that tasting in
2006 the very same wine
from stag sleep actually came top of the
list
to everyone’s amazement what this
tasting really proved
was that the differences between the
very top quality wines of france
and the very top quality wines of
california
is so difficult to tell that had the
tasting been done on a different day
a different result would have almost
certainly been
the outcome i didn’t really know the
story of the wine tasting event it was
aware of judgment paris from old master
paintings so
it’s quite an interesting take on that
theme and um
it sounded interesting but i loved the
way that sir peter told the story he had
a real sort of tempered passion about it
you could see that he was really
involved
and that kind of triggered my
imagination and i could see images
starting to sort of like formulate in my
mind so
it seemed like a winner from the start
of me just like uh i thought i had great
potential
i mean the idea of the supposed dog
started like taking on and beating
a sort of long-established champion
sounds like a great story in itself
but the fact that there was so much
personal interest from sir peter michael
and
he had his own vineyard out in in
california it just had a great story
so every day i was in the studio took a
photograph so you can see it on this
video
from when it’s a blank canvas to how it
is now
and the last photograph was when it was
installed on wednesday
and so you see the last image from the
studio which looks great i was very
pleased with it and then it’s here with
the lights on and it was like ta-da
it’s like it comes to life it really
does sort of fit in there well so i’m
very pleased with it
it’s the event it’s the event it it
it captures a dramatic moment when
people
are surprised shocked and this tells the
story of the tasting
it’s a great story it’s well told the
tasting gives way to
a silence and then an explosion
and that explosion is shown here in
graphic detail
i think it’s it’s one of my better
pieces i’m really proud to put my name
on it
first thing you see coming into this
entrance wall
is this picture behind me but you see it
from some
15 or 20 meters away and as you open
the vista it then opens up as this
extraordinary picture
that gary myers crafted and
he’s produced i think an absolute
masterpiece
you