Fruit of the Vine

For me, spring weather calls for two of my favorite things — parties and wine. While I almost always serve wine at my parties, occasionally I like to make wine the focus of a party, by hosting a wine-tasting party.

While once viewed as an esoteric activity for only hardcore wine aficionados, wine-tasting parties are becoming a very popular activity for wine lovers of all sorts, novices and experts alike. So for this month’s Fruit of the Vine we share some tips and advice for hosting your next (or first) such party. 

The venue:

When most Americans think of wines made from the classic black grape generally known as Syrah in the Old World and Shiraz in the New, they think of the robust red Shirazes from Australia. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Australian Shiraz was one of the most popular imported wines in America. While in the last six or seven years its popularity has been waning, according to USDA import statistics, America still imports more than nine million cases of red wine from Australia each year (down from a peak of nearly 13 million cases in 2005).

Every nation has certain foods and drinks that are so integral to its society that they become part of the very fabric of that nation’s history. In America, we have many such foods and drinks — hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, barbeque ribs, martinis, and Zinfandel wines. 

Thirty-five years ago, in the spring of 1976, a seminal event happened in Paris that changed the map of wine just as much as the American Revolution, 200 years before, had changed the map of the British Empire.

Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, then living in Paris, decided to use the American Bicentennial to generate some publicity for himself. So he invited some of France’s most distinguished wine experts to a blind tasting of the best French and American wines. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: France, of course, would win.