Oenophiles who these days mention California wines -- or Australian and Chilean wines for that matter -- in the same breath as French wines, can do so because of a revolution that occurred one May day in Paris nearly 30 years ago. At a wine tasting, with French judges, California wines came out ahead of French wines in both the white and red categories. That 1976 event was little noticed then amid seemingly more startling world events: Americans elected Jimmy Carter, a novice at Washington politics, as their first post-Watergate president, and Britain and France joined to launch regular flights on the supersonic Concorde. Only one journalist was present at the wine tasting, George M. Taber, then a correspondent for Time magazine. It quickly became clear to him that something big had happened. The event was the catalyst in transforming wine-drinkers' tastes and perceptions and paved the way for the globalization of the wine industry, he writes in a new book, Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine. Taber spoke recently with Knowledge@Wharton.
Knowledge@Wharton: Why do you say this is the golden age of wine?
Taber: The reason is that never in history have so many great wines been made around the world and so many attractive wines made available to the world's consumers. Wine used to be made primarily in Western Europe, in fact almost exclusively in that part of the world. Today it is made in places such as South Africa, New Zealand and Chile, and it's a much more competitive field than it had ever been. The beneficiary of all this is the world's wine consumer. Now, there are still going to be $300 bottles of wine, and those are not going to go away. But there has never been such a proliferation of outstanding wines in the range of $10 to $20.
Knowledge@Wharton: What role did the 1976 wine tasting play in bringing about this change, almost a revolution, in this industry?
Taber: It played a crucial role.
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