Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [74]
What was the Judgment of Paris?
THERE WERE, of course, more than one, so the answer depends on which one you mean. The first judgment reportedly took place more than three thousand years ago on Mount Ida, overlooking the Troäd, the region in north west Asia Minor whose capital was the city of Troy. Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had not been invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (later the parents of Achilles). In anger, she threw a golden apple labeled “To the Fairest” into the midst of the guests at the wedding feast. The guests included the twelve immortal gods and goddesses of Olympus, and three of the goddesses claimed it: Hera, queen of the heavens, wife of Zeus, and inferior only to him in power; Athena, goddess of war and wisdom; and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Zeus wisely refused to adjudicate among them, advising them to seek out Paris (then disguised as a herdsman on Mount Ida, but in reality a son of Priam, the king of Troy) and present their claims. The three goddesses appeared before Paris, told him what they wished him to do, and agreed to accept his decision. Hera promised to make him the ruler of all Asia; Athena promised him victory in all battles, as well as wisdom and beauty; and Aphrodite promised him the fairest woman in the world as his wife. Paris awarded the golden apple, the Apple of Discord, to Aphrodite, and thereby won the eternal hatred of Hera and Athena for himself and for all Trojans. Aphrodite’s promise was kept: Paris did acquire the fairest woman in the world, Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, but only by stealing her and taking her with him back to Troy. The war against Troy was fought to recover Helen, possessor, according to Christopher Marlowe, of “the face which launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.” With the two outraged goddesses, Hera and Athena, on the side of the Greeks, the destruction of Troy and the extinction of its royal family were tragically ensured.
The second Judgment of Paris was rather less earthshaking—except perhaps to those closely involved. A young Englishman, Steven Spurrier, owned a wine shop in Paris called Caves de la Madeleine; in addition, he and an American colleague, Patricia Gallagher, together ran a wine school, l’Académie du Vin. As a way of making the school better known, they set up a competition between French and California wines. They wanted to bring the rapidly improving California wines to the notice of the Europeans, but Spurrier confidently expected the French wines to win. The year was 1976, the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence, used by Spurrier as the publicity handle to bring the competition to public notice.
It was decided that the competition would concentrate on white burgundies versus California chardonnays and on French Bordeaux wines versus California cabernet sauvignons. Of the eleven judges, nine were French, with Spurrier and Gallagher the other two. The wines were tasted blind. To the anger, astonishment, and chagrin of the French judges, a 1973 California chardonnay from Chateau Montelena and a 1973 California cabernet sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, both from the Napa Valley, were ranked first in the competition (the second places were taken by, respectively, Meursault Charmes Roulot 1973 and Château Mouton-Rothschild 1970). At least one of the French judges demanded the return of her scorecards—Spurrier refused—while another explained the red wine rankings by arguing that American wines matured more quickly than did their French counterparts and therefore the latter would not show as well that early in their cycle, thus rendering the whole exercise null and void. The French and California wine worlds were shaken. The Greeks of the ancient world had considered the destruction of Troy, with its attendant slaughter and desecration of sacred places, as signifying the end of the Age of Heroes; this had