I couldn’t help but pass on this nice little story from the Chronicle about the “tasting heard round the world” — the legendary 1976 tasting where a panel of French judges selected California wines over French wines in a blind tasting for the first time in history.
Turns out that this tasting was a bit of a non-event, and the only journalist present was a wine-writing rookie from Time magazine (who happened to speak perfect French). Yet this one small tasting of Chardonnay and Cabernet transformed the wine world in a single fell swoop, toppling France from its pedestal as the only place in the world that “experts” said could produce world-class wines.