WINE
Slate.com

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, the legendary tasting in which a pair of unheralded California wines bested some of France's most celebrated reds and whites. It was, you might say, the collective slurp heard round the world. France losing to the United States at wine? Unthinkable. In a century filled with indignities for France, the Judgment of Paris was another cruel blow. For the most part, though, the French refused to take the result seriously, dismissing it as either an aberration or, worse, the product of Anglo-American chicanery (the tasting was organized by a Brit, Steven Spurrier, who was accused of serving French wines that were either too young or from inferior vintages). The central lesson of the tasting—that competition was now at hand and that French wines would no longer necessarily enjoy a presumption of superiority—was lost on the French. Thirty years later, some of them are paying dearly for their complacency.

The story of the Great Vinous Smackdown is retold in the recently published Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine, written by George M. Taber, the Time magazine correspondent who covered the event. The tasting featured nine French wine experts, among them Odette Kahn, editor of the influential Revue du Vin de France; and Christian Vannequé, sommelier of the three-star Parisian restaurant La Tour d'Argent. The French wines were no less reputable and included the 1970 Haut-Brion, the 1970 Mouton Rothschild, and the 1973 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles. But when the scores were tallied that afternoon at Paris' InterContinental Hotel, it was the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay from Napa that finished first among the whites, and the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, also from Napa, that was tops among the reds. According to Taber, one unnamed, aggrieved Bordeaux chateau owner later told Spurrier, "You've spat in our soup."

Taber's book has inspired a number of commemorative tastings in the lead-up to the anniversary. But the most eagerly awaited Judgment of Paris re-creation is the one being held today—an event organized primarily by Spurrier that is taking place simultaneously in London and Napa. Once more, an impressive panel has been assembled, although this one is not exclusively French; the judges include Vannequé; two British masters of wine, Jancis Robinson and Michael Broadbent; and the journalist Michel Bettane, often called France's Robert Parker. With a few exceptions, the wines are equally stellar. However, unlike the original Judgment of Paris, which became controversial only after the fact, the sequel has been plagued with problems from the outset.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story detailing the difficulties Spurrier has encountered. According to the Journal, the leading Bordeaux châteaux were reluctant to submit any recent vintages for a comparative tasting and ultimately persuaded Spurrier not to put the younger French wines up against their California counterparts (the concern is that the French wines, being slower to mature, would be at a disadvantage). Thus, the only competitive, fully blind portion of today's tasting will be the first flight, featuring the same 10 red wines that were part of the 1976 event. The younger wines (from 2000 to 2004) will be segregated geographically and tasted semiblind—the participants won't know which wine is which, but they will know that Flight 3 consists only of white Burgundies, Flight 4 California cabernets, and so forth.

This arrangement has caused much outrage in the wine blogosphere, where the French are being accused of—what else?—cowardice. But when I spoke with Spurrier this week, he insisted the French didn't have to twist his arm regarding the format. He agreed that it would be unfair to pit young Bordeauxs against equally youthful California cabernets in a blind tasting, because the wines do age differently. In 1976, when California wines still had something to prove, he explained, a head-to-head match-up was necessary. But California established its worthiness 30 years ago.

Still, I think it's a pity they went with a watered-down format. True, we don't need a competitive tasting to tell us that California makes great wines. But a second Judgment of Paris, done well, might have been even more interesting and revealing than the original. A blind tasting that included the three other major grape varieties in which the United States now produces noteworthy wines—merlot, syrah, and pinot noir—could have answered, or raised, all sorts of intriguing questions. Probably the most remarkable aspect of the 1976 tasting, for instance, was how often the California chardonnays were mistaken for white Burgundies. Today, would California chardonnays—which have generally become oakier and more alcoholic over the years—prove equally deceptive? And what about California pinot noir? It's generally considered an entirely different breed than its Burgundian cousin, but who knows what a blind tasting would have turned up.

This new Judgment of Paris comes at a time when a large segment of the French wine industry is mired in crisis—a crisis that might have been mitigated had the French not ignored the message of the first Judgment of Paris. France is currently sitting on an ocean of unsold wine, a glut that has led to a collapse in prices at the cheaper end of the spectrum. According to the New York Times, some 100 million liters of Appellation d'Origine Controlee wine was distilled into ethanol last year. That's enough to fill 133 million bottles. Across France, hundreds of winemakers, and possibly thousands, are on the verge of bankruptcy; it has been suggested by some trade organizations that in the Languedoc, the hardest-hit region, 30 to 50 percent of wineries may ultimately be forced out of business. There have been a number of protests tied to the crisis, and several suicides, as well.

The proximate cause of all this unhappiness is that sales of French wines have been plummeting at home and overseas, especially at the lower price points. Domestic consumption has dropped by more than 40 percent over the last four decades. And France has been hemorrhaging market share abroad, particularly in the two fastest-growing markets, the United States and Britain. The French share of the American market for imported wines fell from 26 percent in 1994 to 14 percent in 2004. Inept marketing is one big reason for the decline, and this ineptitude can be put down to complacency and chauvinism.

The French have been blindsided by the emergence of aggressive competition from Italy, Spain, Australia, South America, and other regions. This isn't true of the very finest French producers; thanks in part to the Judgment of Paris, they recognized early on that the New World was capable of making excellent wine, and they worked to improve their own offerings (which they have done—the good French wines have never been better). By and large, though, after 1976, the French continued to assume that their wines were the only ones worth drinking. They had little interest in foreign wines (even now, French wine shops offer astonishingly few imports), and they put little effort into salesmanship because they figured that French wines, simply by virtue of being French, would sell themselves. Interviewed several years ago, one Burgundian winemaker, Patrick Hudelot, put it well: "In France, there is a belief that you don't need to market your wine, that France's reputation is enough. And that way we are being left behind."

So they are. Thirty years after the Judgment of Paris, shrewdly marketed brands like Australia's Yellow Tail are winning over budget-minded drinkers around the world while a bloated, inefficient French wine industry grapples with millions of liters of unwanted wine and a growing army of destitute vintners. The French can't say they weren't warned.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Warning of Calamities and Hoping for a Change in 'An Inconvenient Truth' By A. O. SCOTT

CANNES, France, May 23 — "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

Appearances to the contrary, Mr. Guggenheim's movie is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a multimedia presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore has given many times over the last few years, interspersed with interviews and Mr. Gore's voice-over reflections on his life in and out of politics. His presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days. But really, the idea that worrying about the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.

In any case, Mr. Gore has long since proven to be a deft self-satirist. (He recently told a moderator at a Cannes Film Festival news conference to address him as "your Adequacy.") He makes a few jokes to leaven the grim gist of "An Inconvenient Truth," and some of them are funny, in the style of a college lecturer's attempts to keep the attention of his captive audience. Indeed, his onstage manner — pacing back and forth, fiddling with gadgets, gesturing for emphasis — is more a professor's than a politician's. If he were not the man who, in his own formulation "used to be the next president of the United States of America," he might have settled down to tenure and a Volvo (or maybe a Prius) in some leafy academic grove.

But as I said, the movie is not about him. He is, rather, the surprisingly engaging vehicle for some very disturbing information. His explanations of complex environmental phenomena — the jet stream has always been a particularly tough one for me to grasp — are clear, and while some of the visual aids are a little corny, most of the images are stark, illuminating and powerful.

I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields and glaciers — consequences of climate change that have already taken place — are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more alarming for being delivered in Mr. Gore's matter-of-fact, scholarly tone.

He speaks of the need to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions as a "moral imperative," and most people who see this movie will do so out of a sense of duty, which seems to me entirely appropriate. Luckily, it happens to be a well-made documentary, edited crisply enough to keep it from feeling like 90 minutes of C-Span and shaped to give Mr. Gore's argument a real sense of drama. As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study. This is not everything you need to know about global warming: that's the point. But it is a good place to start, and to continue, a process of education that could hardly be more urgent. "An Inconvenient Truth" is a necessary film.

'Marie Antoinette': Best or Worst of Times? Under the Spell of Royal Rituals

CANNES, France, May 24 — Though no one called for the filmmaker's head, "Marie Antoinette," Sofia Coppola's sympathetic account of the life and hard-partying times of the ill-fated queen, filled the theater with lusty boos and smatterings of applause after its first press screening on Wednesday. History remembers the queen for her wastrel ways, indifference to human suffering ("Let them eat cake") and death by guillotine, but Ms. Coppola's period film, which is playing in competition, conceives of her as something of a poor little rich girl, a kind of Paris Hilton of the House of Bourbon.

Kirsten Dunst stars as the Austrian princess who was just 14 when she arrived in the French court at Versailles in 1770, as part of an alliance between her mother, the powerful Maria Theresa of Austria, and the French king, the grandfather of her betrothed, the future Louis XVI (the unlikely Jason Schwartzman, in a bit of gag casting).

Her youth and apparent ignorance locked the future queen in a welter of self-indulgence from which she had no reason to escape, or so Ms. Coppola vainly tries to suggest. From the moment Marie Antoinette arrives in France, after being literally stripped bare of her Austrian possessions, she is trussed up in silks and satins, feathers and furs, and restrained by the rituals of court life, as much prisoner as princess.

This is Ms. Coppola's one idea, and it isn't enough. Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story. Thus, despite some lines about the American Revolution, which is helping drain the king's coffers and starve his people, Ms. Coppola ignores what's best about Marie Antoinette's story.

She doesn't seem to realize that what made this spoiled, rotten woman worthy of attention weren't her garden parties and fur-lined shoes, but the role she played in a bloody historical convulsion. Ms. Coppola has an embarrassment of cinematic riches to play with, including the real Versailles, where Marie Antoinette lived most of her short adult life. With the help of the cinematographer Lance Acord and the production designer KK Barrett, both of whom worked on Ms. Coppola's last film, "Lost in Translation," and the costume designer Milena Canonero, who worked on "Barry Lyndon," she creates an opulent proto-Euro Disney cum rave where royals are really just 24-hour party people, full of fun and lots of cake. Soon after arriving at court Marie Antoinette asks a lady-in-waiting (Judy Davis in full twitch), "Isn't all this kind of ridiculous?" "This, madam," the woman answers haughtily, "is Versailles." But truly, madam, this is Hollywood.

Holding a Mirror Up to Hollywood
CANNES, France, May 24 — The first sounds you hear in "Marie Antoinette" are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt.

The first lines invoke "the problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure," one of the chief problems the title character will face. And the name of the song is "Natural Is Not in It," a fitting motto for a film that conjures a world of pure and extravagant artifice.

The applause after the press screening Wednesday morning — there was some! — was mingled with boos, perhaps from die-hard republicans (in the French rather than the American sense) offended by Sofia Coppola's insufficiently critical view of the ancien régime in its terminal decadence. In the movie, the hungry peasants and restless city dwellers who ultimately brought down the French monarchy are mainly a distant rumor, as the action takes place entirely within the hermetic world of the Bourbon court, with its intricate codes of behavior, its curious blend of idle hedonism and solemn purpose, its pervasive gossip and its obsession with fashion and appearance.

A bygone world, of course, as exotic and strange as the hoop skirts and bird-studded hairpieces that exalt Kristen Dunst's appealing American-girl features. Perhaps, but the music is not the only aspect of the movie that pushes it slyly toward the present. My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle.

When Marie reads a radical pamphlet attacking the obscene, self-absorbed luxury of her life in Versailles — "Let them eat cake" and all that — she evokes nothing so much as a young movie star rolling her eyes at the latest scurrility in some trashy celebrity gossip blog.

The clothes, the parties, the flatterers, the entourage, the sham marriages and passionate adulteries: it's American celebrity culture but with better manners and (slightly) more ridiculous clothes. Affairs of state are conducted almost as it they were movie deals. (Are we over budget on that American War of Independence project? Better beef up the marketing campaign.)

But though it depicts a confectionary reality in which appearance matters above all, "Marie Antoinette" is far from superficial, and though it is often very funny, it is much more than a fancy-dress pastiche. Seen from the inside, Marie's gilded cage is a realm of beauty and delight, but also of loneliness and alienation.

It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.

The mixed response on the part of the critics may reflect a certain ambivalence, less about the movie itself than about our own implication in the rarefied society it imagines. To say it's a lot like Hollywood is to say that it's a lot like Cannes. Does that make us courtiers or Jacobins? Should we crown Ms. Coppola with laurels or hustle her into a tumbrel bound for the guillotine? I for one am happy to lose my head over "Marie Antoinette."