Two bottles sit behind glass at the Smithsonian: a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay. They are there because of what happened in a Paris hotel on May 24, 1976, when Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gallagher poured them blind against the best of France for a panel of French judges, and the French judges chose California. Fifty years on, in this anniversary year, American wine finally got around to asking the obvious follow-up question: if the tasting were run again, who would win now? The answer turned out to be nobody the original script had in mind.
The Rematch
The asking took two years. In 2024, nine judges at Pax Wines in Sebastopol blind-tasted more than 1,000 entries from 11 states, with no French benchmarks in the room, to select 20 American finalists. Then, on March 24, 2026, at Smithereens in New York, a project organized by the Sebastopol winemaker Patrick Cappiello of Monte Rio Cellars, with Josh Entman, Vanessa Price, and Ryan Mills-Knapp coordinating, staged what it called the 1976 Redo: 12 judges, the 20 American finalists against 20 French counterparts, blind, across four categories. Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah.
The results redrew the map. Best Chardonnay went to Flâneur Wines’ 2021 Bon Vivant, from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Best Chenin Blanc went to Las Jaras Wines’ 2022 Cuvée Esmé Anne, from Mendocino. Best Syrah went to Scar of the Sea’s 2021 from Bassi Vineyard in San Luis Obispo. And Best Cabernet Sauvignon, the grape on which California’s 1976 legend was built, went to Château Latour 2017. The formal anniversary kept its own calendar: global tastings by the International Wine and Food Society, a year of commemorations from the seven Napa wineries in the original lineup, and, on the anniversary day itself, a San Francisco panel that re-poured the surviving originals beside a modern flight. The Redo was the rematch built from scratch.
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The Map Redrawn
Read the winners’ addresses and the real story emerges. In 1976, “American wine” meant Napa and its neighbors. In 2026, the symbolic American seat migrated north and outward. The Chardonnay crown left California entirely for the Willamette Valley, a region Burgundy itself has been quietly endorsing for decades: Maison Joseph Drouhin planted there in 1987, and Maison Louis Jadot’s Résonance project followed. The momentum is measurable. “It’s a great accolade for us. It’s great for Oregon in general. There’s been a lot of momentum for Willamette Valley Chardonnay,” said Anthony Sereni, Flâneur’s winemaker, and the same season brought a sharper data point: Bethel Heights’ The High Wire 2023 became the first Oregon wine to receive a 100-point score from Decanter.
The Chenin result tells a similar story from a different direction. Las Jaras, the Sebastopol-based project of winemaker Joel Burt and the actor Eric Wareheim, drew the fruit for its winning bottling from Mendocino and beat the Loire at a grape France largely considers its own. “I’ve spent so many years obsessing over and learning from the world’s best Chenin. To come out on top over two of my hero wines from (France’s) Saumur is truly mind-boggling,” Burt said. Add Scar of the Sea’s Syrah from a fog-cooled coastal vineyard in San Luis Obispo and the pattern holds: the New California cohort and the Pacific Northwest, not the estates the 1976 story canonized, now carry the American argument.
What France Kept
And yet the grape that made the legend went home. Château Latour’s 2017 took the Cabernet flight, reclaiming the category California won when a 1973 Stag’s Leap beat a field that included Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion. It was not alone: at the anniversary-day tasting in San Francisco, by the account of its organizer, the critic James Suckling, the modern flight also went to France, Château Haut-Brion 2016 edging a Ridge Monte Bello on a tie-break. The pattern is the sharper for its history. Re-runs of the original bottles, in 1986 and again in 2006, had gone America’s way; the modern reds are where France returned. No tidy explanation is on offer here; two blind tastings are two data points, not a diagnosis. But the symmetry is hard to miss. The variety that announced American wine to the world is the one France took back, while the categories nobody was watching in 1976 are where America now looks most alive.
It is worth remembering how close the original ran. The 1976 scorecards show Roulot’s Meursault-Charmes finishing just behind Montelena among the whites, and Mouton placing second among the reds. Odette Kahn, editor of La Revue du vin de France, famously demanded her scorecard back when the results were read. George Taber of Time, the only journalist who bothered to attend, got one of the century’s great wine stories to himself. The margins were slender; the myth that grew from them was not.
Fifty years later, the bottles in the Smithsonian have not moved, but the map around them has. The lesson of the anniversary year is not that America beat France again, because it did not, not cleanly. It is that the question itself has outgrown its 1976 casting. Oregon pours the Chardonnay now. Mendocino argues with Saumur. Bordeaux’s first growth still holds the Cabernet line. The bottles behind glass settled an argument; their heirs, it turns out, would rather keep having it.
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