The legendary checkout of Shopify is just a shop on your website, and it's ju...
This is a music video for your own. It's a video of the latest vendors with Shopify, which is a great help to support Shopify. It's made in 1976. America is throwing itself apart. 200 years old and feeling good. The fireworks, parades and somewhere in a paraso tell, a very quiet room. 9 of France's most respected wine experts have gathered around the world. Critics, simulian, winemakers, the kind of people who could blind taste a burgundy and tell you which side of the hill the grapes grew on. The man who assembled them was an Englishman named Stephen Spurier. He ran a little wine shop in Paris. He also ran a wine school, but first independent wine school in all of France. He was well liked, well respected, and on this particular afternoon, he was about to make some very power friends.
The idea was simple, a celebration, a friendly comparison of French and American wines in honor of the U.S. by Centennial. His colleague Patricia Gallagher had suggested it. She'd been to Napa, she'd tasted the wines, she believed in him. But here's what nobody told you. Spurier had traveled to California that spring, and hand picked them up.
“Without ever telling the wineries their wine was going to be in a competition. The winemakers back in Napa had no idea what was about to happen.”
Things were a little more archaic than in flying. Patricia had to convince a TWA official to let her carry three cases onto the plane far more than the two-bottle limit. How does she do it? She got help from her fellow passengers. She took it into their luggage. The glasses were poor. The labels were hidden. The judges went to work. Now, everyone in that room expected the same outcome. The French wines would dazzle. The Americans would show well enough, a polite result for a polite occasion. During the tasting, several French judges reportedly assumed certain California wines were French. They scored them highly. They had no idea. When Spurier announced the white wine results, the room would quiet.
A boutique, California Schardonnay, from Château Monteliano, had just beaten the most prestigious wine burgundy's in France, and then came the reds. One female judge, Odette Kong, demanded her ballot bag. She understood immediately what had happened and what it meant. It didn't matter.
“The 1973 Stags Leap Cabernet Sauvignon from Napavalli had just scored higher than Château Montel, Ross Chial, and Château Holt Breone. The French press, they almost ignored the story entirely.”
Spurier was banned from France's prestigious wine tasting tour for a year, apparently, as punishment. The one reporter in the room, a young time magazine writer, filed his story.
It ran buried on page 85 next to an ad for Armstrong tires. Nobody thought it mattered, but here's the rest of the story.
“Thirty years later, the same wines were tasted again. The French had been saying all along that California wines couldn't age. The time would prove them right. In 2006, the top five wines were all from California.”
Warren, when Arsky, the wine maker behind Stags Leap, eventually sold his property for a 185 million by Gurgit Château Montelena.
One on to found his Napa winery, and the quiet little wine school in Paris that it started at all, it changed how the entire world thinks about where great wine could come from.
The French judges sat down to confirm whatever one already knew. They ended up proving exactly the opposite. The movie Bottle Shock really brings home this story.
If you haven't seen it, put it on your to-do list. And now you know the back label story. [Music]
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