Our very first wine tasting trip occurred in 1977, when we visited Napa Valley for the first time. By this point in our lives, we were wine enjoyers, not yet enthusiasts. Almost everything we drank was either French or Italian. Sure, we had some California wine, but it came in jugs and we served it at parties. We were too classy (meaning snobbish and uninformed) to drink American wine.
The iconic Robert Mondavi winery.
But then the newspapers became full of articles about a wine tasting in France that has come to be known as The Judgment of Paris. In May, 1976 California wines, mostly from Napa Valley, had competed side-by-side with the top tier of French wines and (amazing!) the American wines came out on top. So we started to buy some wines from California that came in regular wine bottles. But we didn’t know what to buy and even if we did, the distribution networks that exist today weren’t there in those days, so better California wines weren’t in our stores.
So the next year, when as luck would have it, we attended a conference in San Francisco, we took an extra day to voyage across the Bay Bridge and see what Napa Valley was all about. There were nowhere as many wineries in the valley as there are today. By this time, we had learned about a few of them and made sure to try the ones we’d heard of.
Memory is a bit foggy nearly a half century later. We know we went to Chandon. The bubbly wine that we tasted – we were warned not to call it Champagne – was wonderful! So much better than the plonk we were used to back home. And we went to Robert Mondavi, which was a revelation. It wasn’t just the wines, though they were amazing. It was the beauty of the architecture, the grounds and the vineyards that blew us away (and made us into wine tasters to this day).
And we’re sure we had a tasting at Louis M. Martini. Memory may be playing tricks, but we think we got to meet Mr. Martini himself on that occasion. It was definitely a simple operation, unlike the elegant tasting facilities at Martini today. Here were hearty, accessible wines that we could afford to buy. Their wines became a mainstay of our cellar (that was actually the bottom of the linen closet).
Without getting into a comparison of French, Italian and Californian wines, it is fair to say that in those early years of our wine-drinking lives, the quality difference at the price point we could afford in those days – five dollars was a lot – was pretty great. Decades of inflation and some improvement in our tastes make wine rather more expensive nowadays, and our cellar contains wine from more places. There will always be a place for California wines. Their power is unmistakable, both in terms of flavors and the amount of alcohol (although climate change is forcing the Europeans to bottle wines that are catching up to California in that regard). But in the 1970’s all we knew was we had discovered something new that opened taste vistas for us.