Jancis writes On this Fourth of July it seems appropriate to consider three producers whose wines changed how American wine was viewed, and indeed how all of non-European wine has been viewed, ever since the famous Judgment of Paris tasting 40 years ago.
This was so nearly a non-event. When the young British wine merchant (now not-so-young wine writer) Steven Spurrier decided with his business partner to show some of the new-wave California wines to Parisian wine luminaries in 1976, he decided only just before the event to turn it into...