In Movies: The Day California Wine Grew Up
The Judgment of Paris is coming to film this summer. No, it’s got nothing to do with the heiress or with the city’s notoriously unfriendly residents. It’s all about the wine.
The Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 or the “Judgment of Paris” was a wine competition organized in Paris in 1976 by Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, in which French judges did blind tasting of top-quality chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon wines from France and from California. California wines rated best in each category, which caused surprise as France was generally regarded as being the foremost producer of the world’s best wines. Spurrier sold only French wine and believed that the California wines would not win.
The movie, which comes out in the U.S. this August, is titled Bottle Shock. Though Variety digs it, the movie features a mostly underwhelming ensemble cast–which worked for Sideways, that other wine movie, but not for many other films. I’m guessing it won’t work for audiences, especially as there also lurks a competing movie about the same events (and packed with more star power), titled Judgment of Paris. Journalists hate when that happens.
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