THE NEW INTERNATIONAL STYLE

Some 35 years after the world’s most famous tasting, the world of fine wine has changed irrevocably. Or has it? Perhaps the old wine order never fell. We put the theory to a (very exclusive) test. Darius Sanai

This year marks the 35th anniversary of an event that, for many, marked the historical turning point in the world of fine wine. It was in May 1976 that a young British wine merchant based in Paris, Stephen Spurrier, put together a tasting of the finest wines of France against the finest wines of California. Until that point, French wine reigned unchallenged in the minds of the world’s collectors: you might have the odd case of sweet wine from elsewhere, like a Trockenbeereauslese Riesling from Germany, or perhaps a Tokaji from Hungary. But if you were showing, or making a gift of, the world’s greatest wines, white or red, you’d choose from the big names of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Period.

Suggesting back then that wines from elsewhere (let alone from somewhere as ‘other’ as California, land of Hollywood, Disneyland and the hippie movement) could mount a serious challenge to the gustatorial superiority of France invited the same reaction as claiming now that Los Angeles has dressmakers to match the haute couture of Chanel and Dior.

So the tasters at what would make the front cover of Time magazine as the Judgement of Paris were fairly certain of what the outcome would be when some Bordeaux First Growth chateaux like Mouton- Rothschild and Haut Brion were ranged against unknown names like Stag’s Leap and Ridge Monte Bello from the Napa Valley. The judges were drawn from the upper echelons of France’s wine aristocracy: the owner of the Domaine de la Romanee Conti estate, the editor of the esteemed Revue de Vin de France. Tasting blind, these aribiters of French style – wine couturiers, if you like – overwhelmingly awarded top marks to the upstarts from California, mistaking them for their country’s own top cuvees.

A storm followed as the judges attempted to have coverage of the tasting blocked, and their notes withdrawn. Cleverly, Spurrier had invited a journalist from Time, then the world’s most influential magazine, to attend, and the next week’s cover declared that America had overwhelmed the best that France could throw at it in a tasting of fine wine. The LA frock makers had beaten the couture houses.

It is fashionable to say that the world of wine never recovered from this turnaround. Certainly, top wines from California were soon catapulted towards the top of the wine price league. For a while in the 1990s, the owners of the most famous chateaux in Bordeaux, like Latour, Lafite and Margaux, watched helplessly as prices of California cult wines, like Harlan Estate and Screaming Eagle, soared past their own, which had been references for more than 200 years. (Even Thomas Jefferson was an avid collector of Bordeaux, buying up Chateau Haut- Brion in the 1780s in Paris and exporting it to Virginia). The Americans were aided by top scores from uber-critic Robert Parker, whose scores out of 100 had a powerful influence on a wine’s price and status: the cult Californians were scoring higher, more consistently, than the cream of Europe.

Cult Californians still command vast prices today, and because of tiny production quantities, are extremely hard to get hold of. Even the latest oligarch of the moment, keen to secure a few cases of Screaming Eagle for a party, would find it genuinely difficult if not impossible, even with the help of the world’s best concierge services. In contrast, Bordeaux production, even at the top end, is considerably higher: at any one point there are tens or hundreds of cases of even the top vintages of First Growths on the world market.

But the new reality of the luxury market mean that things have changed: indeed, are coming close to describing a full circle. Some 40 years ago, if you wanted to impress friends, colleagues and contacts in the world’s most dynamic economy (the US), you served Bordeaux. Now, if you want to impress friends, colleagues and contacts in the world’s most dynamic economy (mainland China), you serve... Bordeaux.

The Chinese fine wine market doesn’t just prefer claret (the traditional name for Bordeaux), it devours top clarets like an oligarch’s wife tears through a Louboutin store. And China determines the wine market now. The price of back vintages of Chateau Lafite (the favoured of all the five first growths, which also encompass Latour, Margaux, Mouton- Rothschild and Haut Brion) has gone up by up to 500% in the past four years because of demand from China. Mouton-Rothschild’s yet to be bottled 2008 release doubled in price overnight when the chateau revealed the label would be designed by Xu Lei, the 47-year-old director of the Today Art Museum, Beijing's leading contemporary art museum. Lafite is planting a vineyard in China; the owners of other Chateaux like Lynch Bages and Beychevelle have enough demand to sell their entire annual production to China (although they don’t). Mention Screaming Eagle at a connoisseurs’ dinner in Beijing and you’ll likely get a funny look; bring a bottle of Lafite, and you’ll have friends for life.

The Chinese market views top wines like it views top makers of handbags, watches, jewellery, or dresses: as luxury brands in their own right. Robert Parker’s ratings are irrelevant, as witnessed by recent studies by Liv-Ex, the London wine analyst, showing that as the Chinese market has started to set prices in the world, Parker’s influence has waned.

There are various theories about whether this will continue, or whether the Chinese wealthy will become as discerning as to the minutiae of taste in each bottle as their counterparts in Singapore (long one of the world’s fine wine centres) or London, with the importance of brand fading.

Nobody can predict the future, so instead I recently convened a reprise of the Judgment of Paris tasting (but with a twist) in the considerable settings of an oligarch friend’s mansion on Lake Como (he dislikes being called an oligarch, so I won’t say it again). The wines in his cellar, which I can immodestly reveal to have chosen for him, are worth considerably more than the average house in Britain. For the tasting, we convened a British businesswoman, a Swiss banker, an Italian dandy, a Singaporean Chinese polymath, an industrialist from the former Soviet Union, as well as a few others, to ensure an even spread of tastes.

There were no representatives at all from the countries battling it out. These were as follows. France was represented by Chateau Latour 1996 and Chateau Haut Brion 2003, both first growths. The US sent in as its elite team Colgin IX, a Robert Parker 100 Pointer and a ‘cult Cabernet’ and Point Blanc 2007, a Californian take on France’s famous Chateau Cheval Blanc, from Sir Peter Michael, the British entrepreneur. Spain was represented by the best of the old, Vega Sicilia’s Unico 1998, and the best of the new, the 100 Point, even more expensive, Pingus 2005 from Peter Sisseck.

You’re asking who won, and the answer is, who wins between Miro, Matisse and Chagall? What was notable was the sheer standard of these wines. As the president of one of the Bordeaux first growths told me recently, modern techniques and climate change have combined to make wines better – more complex, more focussed, more sophisticated – than they were 35 years ago. They were all magnificent, and differences were differences of personal taste. But if you wanted to show guests who otherwise were too important or too busy to notice what they were drinking, that you were giving them the very best, then the two Bordeaux first growths would win, as they have since Jeferson's time.

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