How a blind taste competition launched the American wine industry

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How a blind taste competition launched the American wine industry

How a blind taste competition launched the American wine industry

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Mark Dent

Published:

May 15, 2026

Fifty years ago, France was the undisputed leader in wine. The Judgment of Paris changed everything.

The tablecloth was white, and the wines were red. The organizers were British and American, and the judges were French. And pretentious.

Actually, that last part probably conveys an unfair French stereotype. Let’s just say they were confident.

There were nine of them. Each came to the Intercontinental Hotel near the Champs-Élysées in Paris to compare the tastes of ten glasses of American and French wine — cabernets and chardonnays — poured from unmarked bottles.

It was May 24, 1976. Around 3pm, the judges took their first sips.

Within days, the global wine industry would be changed forever. So would the life of an American immigrant who’d become known as the King of Chardonnay.

The suffering that built a wine legend

Miljenko “Mike” Grgich ’s love affair with wine began with a moment of trepidation. One day, when he was about two and a half, he got in trouble and his mother stopped breastfeeding him as punishment.

“She said, ‘No more milk,’ and I thought I was going to die,” Grgich recalled in an oral history interview. “She said, ‘No, you are not going to die. I’ll switch you from milk to wine.’”

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Born in 1923 in tiny Desne, Croatia, he was the youngest of 11 children. His father raised sheep, grew wheat and corn, and made wine, following the mantra of “drink the best, sell the rest.”

The farm didn’t have electricity or machinery, so every child had to help. Grgich stomped grapes at age 3.

Later, he studied winemaking at the University of Zagreb, supporting himself by working at a genetics institute. He didn’t own a car, much less a bike, and lived in a small room originally built for maids.

“I knew that I had to suffer,” he said. “The only lucky thing I have in my life is that I know that in life one has to suffer, and I accepted suffering as a part of life.”

His goal was to get out of Communist-run Yugoslavia and make wine in California. Grgich had family in the Pacific Northwest, and one of his professors raved about the state’s climate.

At the time, America mostly produced cheap jug wine (the equivalent of watered-down Franzia, without any bag to slap). Even the nicer California wines were better for washing down food than savoring for taste.

The global culture of wine was dominated by the French and, more specifically, the French concept of terroir . Translated as “sense of place,” terroir means that soil, climate, and other environmental factors are tied together with the quality of grapes and the character of wine they produce.

Terroir was loaded with subtext: It meant that only France and its centuries-old wine culture had ideal terroir. And that any wine grape grown outside France was naturally inferior.

No wonder that, in the 1940s, France produced ~2B gallons of wine annually, while the US made ~150m gallons .

Grape vines in Napa Valley. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

But America was slowly building a wine culture.

University of California, Davis professor Harold Olmo bred dozens of grapes better suited for California.

Fellow professors Maynard Amerine and Albert Winkler released the Amerine-Winkler Index that helped winemakers develop ideal growing conditions — good terroir, if you will.

Grgich immigrated to the US in 1958 — after first escaping to West Germany on a temporary visa — as these innovations spread. He got a job with Chateau Souverain in Napa Valley by advertising himself in the Wine Institute’s bulletin. For four months, he picked grapes during the day, crushed them in the evening, and cooled the juice at night.

Then came stints with Beaulieu Vineyard and Robert Mondavi. His biggest break yet came in 1972. Attorney James Barrett purchased the long-neglected Chateau Montelena and brought on Grgich to design the winery and all the wines.

Their first was a chardonnay.

“I put all of my body and soul into it,” Grgich recalled.

Meanwhile, ~20 miles south, an academic named Warren Wisniarski , who’d grown disenchanted with the higher ed rat race, opened Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 1970, where he planted Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

In 1973, the growing season was warm and dry, nearly ideal for the California wineries. The Stag’s Leap cabernet and the Chateau Montelena chardonnay were priced at a modest ~$6 per bottle...