A new-concept redo of the famed 1976 Judgment of Paris — organized by sommelier-turned-winemaker Patrick Cappiello of California’s Monte Rio Cellars — is about to drop within the first half of 2025. And within the buildup, all of the sometimes related (and far deserving) historic names from the unique occasion are again within the dialog: organizers Steven Spurrier and Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher, Chateau Montelena’s Mike Grgich and the Barrett household, Warren Winiarski of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, and many others.
However there’s a forgotten identify hidden within the shadows, accumulating cultural cobwebs regardless of its crucial significance and prior fame. It’s a reputation now persistently omitted from the listing of those that deserve credit score for the general grand arrival of California wine on the worldwide stage.
That identify is Harry Waugh, born 1904 simply north of London, and lovingly identified amongst his American contemporaries as “the person with the million greenback palate.”
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“His interval of affect was a very long time in the past, most likely earlier than most people 1735829982 within the California commerce had been born,” says Jancis Robinson, the Monetary Instances wine author, critic, writer, and editor in chief at JancisRobinson.com. And whereas the esteemed Englishman wasn’t immediately concerned within the Judgment, with out his advocacy and affect within the years main as much as the surprising Californian conquer France, it’s questionable whether or not any points of the period’s nice California wine awakening — and all the results, good and dangerous, that adopted — would have unfolded the best way they did.
Whether or not by retailers, writers, storied restaurateurs, or illustrious winemakers, Waugh’s influence was felt in each nook of that epoch’s wine ecosystem.
California Wine’s Unique English Ally
Within the Sixties and early ’70s, previous to the infamous tasting, California was nonetheless largely thought of a wine-world backwater exterior the U.S. Whereas the state was already a home powerhouse of manufacturing going again a century, the repressive calamity of Prohibition and its lingering aftershocks had continued to stymie California wine’s wider acceptance.
Californians might crow all they needed in regards to the high quality of what they had been producing, however that evangelism would overwhelmingly fall on deaf ears over in Europe. As so usually is the case, it required the advocacy of one in all their very own for Europeans to lastly notice the magic of what the Golden State was producing.
By the point the early Sixties rolled round, Harry Waugh served as each a director at Bordeaux’s grand Château Latour and a veteran purchaser and director at famed U.Ok. importing service provider Harveys of Bristol, the place he was instrumental in shaping no much less a legend than the late wine author and auctioneer Michael Broadbent. “He was very a lot Michael Broadbent’s mentor,” Robinson says. “I wouldn’t say Harry was an awesome stylist so far as writing goes. His expertise was extra in tasting and figuring out high quality in wines.”
In keeping with many who knew him and his work, Waugh’s economic system and understatement in each his writing and analysis allowed him to chop via the pomp and into the accessible soul of wine. He was fairly actually the alternative of right now’s flamboyant, advert nauseam grocery listing of taste references.
“Harry would make the introductions for Bern, particularly in Europe, of all these wine folks. [And] Harry would inform Bern, ‘Hey, you can purchase this cellar or purchase that cellar [at the Christie’s auctions].’ The Bern’s cellar wouldn’t be almost as spectacular as it’s with out Harry.”
“My father described Harry Waugh as one of many best wine tasters of all time,” says Bartholomew Broadbent, son of Michael, and proprietor and CEO of touchstone importer Broadbent Picks. “Harry simply understood wine and instructed you if it was good or not with very minimal descriptors. Simplicity was his essence. He was a modest man with a modest use of phrases to convey a message. He wrote and described wine in a manner which made sense.”
His wine travels, and subsequent writings about stated journeys, started pushing California wine towards cultural recognition among the many English. “Michael obtained him recording his U.S. travels in a collection of diaries revealed by Michael when he was at Christie’s,” Robinson says. But even earlier than that, his books — starting with 1966’s “Bacchus on the Wing” — had been opening the minds of these within the European wine commerce to the spectacular potential of California wine.
By 1976’s Judgment, supposedly the spark that ignited every thing in accepted California wine lore, Waugh had already revealed volumes on the subject and was busy founding the Zinfandel Membership in London — together with fellow Englishmen John Avery and Hugh Johnson — as an evangelical outpost to extol the deserves of California’s largely unheralded wines within the U.Ok.
The Bern’s Steak Home Connection
A mecca for wine professionals and lovers globally, Bern’s Steak Home in Tampa, Fla., boasts the world’s largest single-owner personal wine assortment on Earth. It’s a triumph, a dizzyingly numerous, passionate aggregation of greater than a half-million bottles lovingly foraged over many years.
But Bern and Gert Laxer’s singular imaginative and prescient of wine cellar greatness couldn’t have been constructed with out one Harry Waugh. It’s a relationship so symbiotic that the famed dessert lounge at Bern’s, full with personal cubicles original from previous wine casks, is deferentially titled the Harry Waugh Dessert Room.
“If you happen to requested anybody of significance in Napa Valley about who was doing essentially the most to advertise Napa Valley wines, the reply would virtually actually have been Barney Rhodes [of Bella Oaks Vineyard] as an American and Harry Waugh as a Brit.”
Waugh was a connector as a lot as he was an advocate, and opened cellar doorways for Bern internationally. “It’s fairly loopy, the Bern’s tie-in to the wine world that nobody knew about,” says Eric Renaud, the longtime former wine director at Bern’s Steak Home. “Harry would make the introductions for Bern, particularly in Europe, of all these wine folks. [And] Harry would inform Bern, ‘Hey, you can purchase this cellar or purchase that cellar [at the Christie’s auctions].’ The Bern’s cellar wouldn’t be almost as spectacular as it’s with out Harry.”
True to type, the Englishman pointed Bern within the route of the good wines of California. “Now we have ’60s- and 70s-era California wines in multitudes, most likely greater than some other. And particularly of Zinfandel,” Renaud says. “A number of the guys speak about Bordeaux and Burgundy of the early twentieth century … however I’ve put these Zins up in opposition to Burgundy, and a pair guys thought it was Burgundy.”
As if to finish the cosmic wine circle underneath Waugh’s mentorship, it seems that the official photographer on the Judgment of Paris was none apart from that titan of Tampa himself, Bern Laxer.
“With out these giants who nobody is aware of about, like Harry, California wine and Bern’s wouldn’t be what they’re right now,” Renaud says. “Spurrier and those that adopted owe so much to him.”
A Bygone Period of Transatlantic Wine Appreciation
Although he now seems as a mere footnote in California wine historical past, Waugh was a monumental determine in his time.
“If you happen to requested anybody of significance in Napa Valley about who was doing essentially the most to advertise Napa Valley wines, the reply would virtually actually have been Barney Rhodes [of Bella Oaks Vineyard] as an American and Harry Waugh as a Brit,” Broadbent says. “The good restaurateurs of San Francisco, like Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters, would all bear in mind [him].”
However simply as necessary as Waugh’s affect was as California cheerleader-in-chief, it’s crucial to acknowledge that his advocacy was a complementary two-way conduit between the continents on the time.
“It gave him the chance to point out California wines to Europeans, and deliver extra information of French wines to the Individuals,” Renaud says. However whereas European appreciation of California wine has skilled a backslide for the reason that days of Waugh — for varied causes together with its modernist fashion, exorbitant pricing, and the home oversupply tormenting Europe — his dissemination of European wine tradition within the States stays undoubtedly influential to a whole era of California winemakers.
Amongst these is California’s beloved “Godfather of Zinfandel,” Joel Peterson. Because the founder and winemaker emeritus at Ravenswood Vineyard, in addition to present vintner and sole proprietor of As soon as & Future Wine, Peterson absorbed Waugh’s affect through his dad and mom, Frances and Walter Peterson. “My mom was very concerned in cooking, and recipe-tested for the primary Chez Panisse cookbook. My father began one of many first wine newsletters within the San Francisco Bay space. They had been a part of the Bay Space wine scene that revolved round Berkeley wine and meals society,” Peterson says. “[Waugh] was a favourite with my dad and mom. My mom was smitten with him,”
“It was the Brits that had been dabbling in California wine,” he provides. The swath of Europe’s main wine-producing nations had been, and proceed to be, self-absorbed. “I doubt whether or not the French had any curiosity in California wine,” Peterson says. “In actual fact, California was nonetheless modeling them, which might be why they had been so smug about, and shocked by, the outcomes.” Clearly, getting bested at their very own recreation isn’t one thing the French deal with simply.
However Peterson agrees that the course of California wine’s international awakening was indelibly influenced by Waugh’s contagious zeal for the magic that was taking place on the West Coast at the moment — and provides that California advocacy in Europe at present lacks a determine of Waugh’s pedigree and fervour. “I’ve been promoting wine for a number of many years in Europe and the U.Ok. There are perilously few which have taken up the mantle of wine’s California champion,” Peterson says. “There’s nobody fairly like him right now.”
As for why Waugh has been relegated to a quiet apart within the grand recounting of California’s wine historical past, Renaud paradoxically factors straight to one in all Waugh’s best attributes: his sensible prescience. “He was forward of his time. I don’t assume the U.S. was prepared for him,” Renaud says. Whether or not remembered and appreciated or not, California owes Waugh an immense debt of gratitude for the vinous path he blazed towards its eventual international eminence.
