Category: France

The Cholera and Bubonic Plague Vaccination Campaigns of Waldemar Haffkine Count as Evidence of “the Benevolence of British Medical Imperialism”

(p. C7) “In the end, all history is natural history,” writes Simon Schama in “Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.” The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.

. . .

Inoculation, Mr. Schama writes, became a “serious big business” in commercial England, despite the inoculators’ inability to understand how (p. C8) it worked, and despite Tory suspicions that the procedure meant “new-fangled,” possibly Jewish, interference in the divine plan. In 1764, the Italian medical professor Angelo Gatti published an impassioned defense of inoculation that demolished humoral theory. Mr. Schama calls Gatti an “unsung visionary of the Enlightenment.” His work was a boon to public health, though his findings met resistance in France, where the prerevolutionary medical establishment was more concerned with protecting its authority.

. . .

(p. C8) Mr. Schama alights on the story of Waldemar Haffkine, the Odessa-born Jew who created vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1892, Haffkine inoculated himself against cholera with the vaccine he had developed at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He went on to inoculate thousands of Indians, and so effectively that his campaigns served as, in Mr. Schama’s words, “an advertisement for the benevolence of British medical imperialism.”

. . .

The author notes the contrast between the facts of Haffkine’s achievements and the response of the British establishment, with its modern echoes of the medieval fantasy that Jews were “demonic instigators of mass death.” Yet Mr. Schama’s skepticism of authority only extends so far. It would have been instructive to learn why, when Covid-19 appeared, the WHO concurred with Voltaire that the Chinese were “the wisest and best governed people in the world” and advised liberal democracies to emulate China’s lockdowns.

Haffkine’s colleague Ernest Hanbury Hankin once wrote an essay called “The Mental Limitations of the Expert.” Mr. Schama’s conclusion shows the limitations of our expert class, which appears not to understand the breach of public trust caused by the politicization of Covid policy and the suppression of public debate. You do not have to be “far right” to distrust mandatory mRNA vaccination. As Mr. Schama shows, the health of the body politic depends on scientific inquiry.

For the full review, see:

Dominic Green. “Protecting the Body Politic.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 22, 2023, and has the title “‘Foreign Bodies’ Review: Migrant Microbes, Human Borders.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

British Colonial Authorities in India “Eased Out” Vaccine Innovator

(p. 19) The story of Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine, little told in the West beyond the world of bacteriology and within the annals of Judaica, is thrilling in its nobility and verve, and it might have better served Schama’s purpose had he devoted the entire book to the tale of a man he so clearly adores.

. . .

He was born in Odessa in 1860, and as a teenager was set to defending his community from the endless Russian pogroms. In time he moved to Switzerland and then to France, where he trained at the Pasteur Institute and, after studying paramecium, threw his energies into the scourge of cholera. He treated himself with an experimental vaccine and took off to India in 1893 to see how it worked.

That it did, brilliantly, and by today’s reckoning his invention saved millions. His more remarkable eventual success came five years later with a vaccine for eradicating bubonic plague.

Schama — by his own admission no biologist — describes the painstaking method of making a plague vaccine with enthralling technical precision. He writes of the gentle and respectful means of extracting the noxious fluids from the swollen buboes that dangled in the intimate parts of the infected and the dying; of the subsequent culturation process, in ghee-covered flasks of goat broth — no cow or pig could be used, since the vaccines would be given to Hindu and Muslim alike — and then of the nurturing of the resulting silky threads that held the trove of bacilli, ready to be injected.

Notwithstanding Haffkine’s immense contribution to India’s public health, the British colonial authorities, haughty and racist by turn, eventually wearied of the man. Their own means of dealing with infection had, after all, relied on brawn and bombast — the wholesale destruction of villages, the eviction of natives, the smothering of everything with lime and carbolic acid. Such schemes had generally failed, and it irritated the burra sahibs that a foreigner, and moreover a keen adherent to an alien belief, could succeed where they had not.

And so Haffkine was eased out, first from his Calcutta laboratory across to Bombay, and then out of the empire’s crown jewel altogether. He later went to Lausanne, where he would spend his final years.

For the full review, see:

Simon Winchester. “The Vaccinator.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 5, 2023): 19.

(Note: ellipsis added. In the original only the words “burra sahibs” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 28, 2023, and has the title “Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Some Prefer Lab Coats.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

“France’s Most Famous Public Intellectual” Fears That if Putin Conquers Ukraine Western Civilization “Might Collapse”

(p. C1) In his new documentary film “Slava Ukraini,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous public intellectual, dodges Russian sniper fire in Ukraine, nonchalantly wearing a khaki bulletproof vest over a chic bespoke suit.

He climbs onto a Ukrainian naval vessel in Odessa that is sweeping the Black Sea for Russian mines, his mane of graying hair blowing gently in the wind. And he surveys blown-out apartment blocks in Kyiv, descends into trenches with Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk and comforts a mother whose young son is so traumatized by war, he has stopped speaking.

It can be easy to dismiss Lévy — and plenty do — as a 74-year-old reckless war tourist, an heir to a timber fortune playing action hero as Russian missiles rain down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. But instead of spending the last 12 months in his art-filled home on Paris’s right bank or enjoying retirement at his 18th-century palace in Marrakesh, Lévy has been braving Russian military assaults, vertigo and what (p. C5) he calls his natural tendency for melancholy to make his Ukraine film.

It was, he said, a necessary cri de coeur to support Ukraine in a conflict he views as nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.

“In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said during an interview at the Carlyle Hotel in New York earlier this month, . . .

For the full story, see:

Dan Bilefsky. “A Philosopher Chooses Action.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 1, 2023): C1 & C5.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 28, 2023, and has the title “A Polarizing French Philosopher Chooses War Zones Over Salons.”)


Spreading Smallpox Inoculation to Impress Voltaire

(p. A15) Dimsdale had been summoned by Catherine the Great to inoculate not only the empress herself but also her 13-year-old heir, the Grand Duke Paul.

. . .

As Lucy Ward dramatically relates in “The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus,” Catherine’s invitation was a high-stakes affair, a testament to Dimsdale’s writings on the methodology of smallpox inoculation and his reputation for solicitous care. His Quaker upbringing had encouraged a brand of outcome- rather than ego-led practice.

. . .

As devastating as smallpox was, for the empress herself and the grand duke who would succeed her to personally undergo inoculation was a risk to both patient and doctor. On the success side stood immunity from the disease, an almost holy example for Catherine’s people, and as-yet-untold riches for her nervous doctor. On the other side, not only the fact that all Russia would refuse the treatment if their “Little Mother” died, but also a disaster for Dimsdale and the son who had accompanied him. Geopolitics came into play too—if things went wrong, some would interpret it as a foreign assassination.

. . .

With a happy result for her and her less-robust son, Catherine sets about publicizing the success. Dimsdale receives the equivalent of more than $20 million and a barony. Bronze medals are cast of Catherine’s profile, reading “She herself set an example.” It helps that Catherine was competitive beyond reason: “we have inoculated more people in a month than were inoculated in Vienna in eight,” she wrote to Voltaire, determined to beat Empress Maria Theresa’s efforts.

For the full review, see:

Catherine Ostler. “BOOKSHELF; Inoculate Conception.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 23, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 22, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Empress and the English Doctor’ Review: Inoculate Conception.”)

The book under review is:

Ward, Lucy. The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus. London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2022.

California Should Go Nuclear

(p. C1) A recent study sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Clean Air Task Force concluded that to meet its net-zero pledge by 2045, the state of California will need power that is not only “clean” but “firm”—that is, “electricity sources that don’t depend on the weather.” The same is true around the world, and nuclear offers a relatively stable source of power.

Nuclear plants don’t depend on a steady supply of coal or gas, where disruptions in commodity markets can lead to spikes in electricity prices, as has happened this winter in Europe. Nor do nuclear plants depend on the weather. Solar and wind have a great deal of potential, but to be reliable energy sources on their own, they require advanced batteries and high-tech grid management to balance varying levels of power generation with anticipated spikes in demand. That balancing act is easier and cheaper with the kind of firm power that nuclear can provide.

. . .

(p. C2) In France, as part of a massive push to “reindustrialize,” the government will spend $1.13 billion on nuclear power R&D by 2030. The focus is on developing a new generation of small modular reactors (SMRs) to replace parts of the existing fleet that supplies around 70% of the country’s electricity.

. . .

. . . it’s , , , important to recognize that regulatory oversight and safety provisions are usually effective. Even the Fukushima accident, or the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, could be considered a success on the safety front: Some safety features failed but others worked, containing the fallout.

. . .

SMRs and other new technologies are the nuclear industry’s big hope. One focus of research is using new fissile materials such as thorium, which is more abundant, produces less waste and has no direct military applications. Other technologies look to using existing nuclear waste as a fuel source. Turning away from massive reactors toward SMRs might, at first, increase costs per unit of energy produced. But it would open financing models unavailable to large reactors, allowing costs to come down, with reactors following a uniform design instead of being designed one by one. Building many small reactors also allows for learning-by-doing, a model actively pursued by China at home and as part of its Belt and Road Initiative abroad.

None of these new technologies is sure to be economically competitive. Some of the more experimental technologies, like China’s thorium reactors, might yet pay off. TerraPower, a venture founded by Bill Gates, has been working on natrium reactors for over a decade and recently added a molten-salt design to the mix, which could make a real difference if it works out. The point is to try. Like solar and wind, nuclear energy could climb the learning curve and slide down the cost curve with the right financial backing.

For the full commentary, see:

Gernot Wagner. “Is Nuclear Power Part of the Climate Solution?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022): C1-C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 7, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The commentary quoted above is related to the author’s book:

Wagner, Gernot. Geoengineering: The Gamble. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021.

Technological Progress Helped Create Cosmopolitan Europe

(p. C7) Cultural history is frequently written as if circumscribed by national borders, with each country laying claim to a discrete social and intellectual way of life. Dismayed at this tendency, Orlando Figes, a noted historian of Russia, found himself wondering whether the forces of transnational integration weren’t at least as decisive as those that would drive cultures apart. In his new study “The Europeans” he aims “to approach Europe as a space of cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries, out of which a ‘European culture’—an international synthesis of artistic forms, ideas and styles—would come into existence and distinguish Europe from the broader world.

. . .

His monumental work is the product of thorough and extensive research, largely in archival sources and in several languages. The author has a remarkable capacity to keep a huge quantity of factual material present in mind, and to bind it moreover into a coherent story. Woven through the biographical narrative is a detailed account of the transformations in technology, mores and law that created the new cosmopolitanism.

Chief among these was the rapid construction of railways, such that in France alone, for example, well more than 8,000 miles of track were laid down between 1850 and 1870. Railway travel gave people the time and comfort to read newspapers and fiction, which they could procure in the dozens of station bookstalls set up by merchants like W.H. Smith. “The train,” Mr. Figes notes, “was smoother than a horse-drawn carriage on a bumpy road, enabling passengers to read a book more easily.” Literacy had increased dramatically, and the rotary press, invented in 1843, facilitated the production of a vast quantity of printed matter, distribution of which deep into the provinces was in turn driven by the ramifying network of trains.

. . .

The spread of gas lighting, invented in the 1790s, made it possible for people to read comfortably in the evening. It also enabled them to play the piano at home, and of course piano technology had kept pace: The instruments became easier to play, and cheaper as well. In 1845, by the author’s estimation, 100,000 people in Paris were playing the piano, of which there were 60,000 in a city of about one million people.

For the full review, see:

Dan Hofstadter. “Engines of Progress.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 19, 2019): C7 & C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 18, 2019, and has the title “‘The Europeans’ Review: Engines of Progress.”)

The book under review in the passages quoted above is:

Figes, Orlando. The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019.

Socialist Mayor’s Environmental Bicycles Turn Paris Streets into Risky Chaos

(p. 4) PARIS — On a recent afternoon, the Rue de Rivoli looked like this: Cyclists blowing through red lights in two directions. Delivery bike riders fixating on their cellphones. Electric scooters careening across lanes. Jaywalkers and nervous pedestrians scrambling as if in a video game.

Sarah Famery, a 20-year resident of the Marais neighborhood, braced for the tumult. She looked left, then right, then left and right again before venturing into a crosswalk, only to break into a rant-laden sprint as two cyclists came within inches of grazing her.

“It’s chaos!” exclaimed Ms. Famery, shaking a fist at the swarm of bikes that have displaced cars on the Rue de Rivoli ever since it was remade into a multilane highway for cyclists last year. “Politicians want to make Paris a cycling city, but no one is following any rules,” she said. “It’s becoming risky just to cross the street!”

The mayhem on Rue de Rivoli — a major traffic artery stretching from the Bastille past the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde — is playing out on streets across Paris as the authorities pursue an ambitious goal of making the city a European cycling capital by 2024.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen-style cycling revolution.

For the full story, see:

Liz Alderman. “PARIS DISPATCH; Europe’s New Cycling Capital, or a Pedestrian’s Nightmare?” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, Oct. 3, 2021): 4.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 4, 2021, and has the title “PARIS DISPATCH; As Bikers Throng the Streets, ‘It’s Like Paris Is in Anarchy’.”)

French Regulators Ban Hardy Grapes that Thrive in Global Warming

(p. A4) BEAUMONT, France — The vines were once demonized for causing madness and blindness, and had been banned decades ago. The French authorities, brandishing money and sanctions, nearly wiped them out.

But there they were. On a hillside off a winding mountain road in a lost corner of southern France, the forbidden crop was thriving. Early one recent evening, Hervé Garnier inspected his field with relief.

In a year when an April frost and disease have decimated France’s overall wine production, Mr. Garnier’s grapes — an American hybrid variety named jacquez, banned by the French government since 1934 — were already turning red. Barring an early-autumn cold snap, all was on track for a new vintage.

“There’s really no reason for its prohibition,” Mr. Garnier said. “Prohibited? I’d like to understand why, especially when you see the prohibition rests on nothing.”

Mr. Garnier is one of the last stragglers in a long-running struggle against the French wine establishment and its allies in Paris. The French government has tried to rip the jacquez and five other American vine varieties out of French soil for the past 87 years, arguing that they are bad for human physical and mental health — and produce bad wine.

But in recent years, the hardiness of the American varieties has given a lift to guerrilla winemakers like him, as climate change wreaks havoc on vineyards across Europe and natural wines made without the use of pesticides have grown in popularity.

. . .

With France awash in wine, lawmakers urgently addressed the problem around Christmas in 1934. To reduce overproduction, they outlawed the six American vines — including hybrids like the jacquez and pure American grapes like the isabelle — mainly on the grounds that they produced poor wine. Production for private consumption would be tolerated, but not for commercial sale.

The government had planned to follow up with bans on other hybrids but stopped because of the backlash to the initial ban, Mr. Lacombe said. Then the war provided another reprieve.

It was only in the 1950s — when hybrids were still cultivated on a third of all French vineyards — that the government really began cracking down on the six forbidden grapes, Mr. Lacombe said. It offered incentives to rip out the offending vines, then threatened growers with fines.

It then condemned the American grapes as harmful to body and sanity with arguments “not completely honest to try to quell a situation that was slipping away from the government,” Mr. Lacombe said.

“In fact, the present defenders of these vines are right in underlining all the historical and government inconsistencies,” he added.

. . .

Originally from northeastern France, Mr. Garnier, now 68, was once a longhaired high school student who traveled to see Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin perform in concert.

. . .

Some years later, he got into winemaking almost by accident. Two elderly brothers asked him to harvest their jacquez grapes in return for half of the wine production. He learned the history of the forbidden vines and eventually bought the brothers’ vineyards.

Today, he makes 3,400 bottles a year of his deeply colored, fruity “Cuvée des vignes d’antan,” or wine from vines of yesteryear. He got around the ban by creating a cultural, noncommercial association, “Memory of the Vine.” A membership fee of 10 euros, or about $12, yields a bottle.

With the growing threat of climate change and the backlash against the use of pesticides, Mr. Garnier is hoping that the forbidden grapes will be legalized and that France’s wine industry will open up to a new generation of hybrids — as Germany, Switzerland and other European nations already have.

“France is a great wine country,” he said. “To remain one, we have to open up. We can’t get stuck on what we already know.”

For the full story, see:

Norimitsu Onishi. “Guerrilla Winemakers Want France to Yield.” The New York Times (Monday, August 30, 2021): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 16, 2021, and has the title “For France, American Vines Still Mean Sour Grapes.”)

Plethora of Creative Chip Startups Face: More Stable Demand, More Tools for Quick Design, More VC Funding

(p. B1) OAKLAND, Calif. — A global shortage of semiconductors has cast a cloud over the plans of carmakers and other companies. But there’s a silver lining for Silicon Valley executives like Aart de Geus.

He is chairman and co-chief executive of Synopsys, the biggest supplier of software that engineers use to design chips. That position gives Mr. de Geus an intimate perspective on a 60-year-old industry that until recently was showing its age.

Everyone now seems to want his opinion, as shown by the dozens of emails, calls and comments he received after addressing a recent online gathering for customers. Synopsys says people tuned in from 408 companies — more than double the number for an in-person event last held in 2019 — and many weren’t conventional chip makers.

. . .

(p. B3) Their overriding question: How do you develop chips more quickly?

Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics, for example, have managed the increasingly difficult feat of packing more transistors on each slice of silicon. IBM on Thursday announced another leap in miniaturization, a sign of continued U.S. prowess in the technology race.

Perhaps most striking, what was a trickle of new chip companies is now approaching a flood. Equity investors for years viewed semiconductor companies as too costly to set up, but in 2020 plowed more than $12 billion into 407 chip-related companies, according to CB Insights.

Though a tiny fraction of all venture capital investments, that was more than double what the industry received in 2019 and eight times the total for 2016. Synopsys is tracking more than 200 start-ups designing chips for artificial intelligence, the ultrahot technology powering everything from smart speakers to self-driving cars.

. . .

The industry has historically been notorious for booms and busts, usually driven by purchasing swings for particular products like PCs and smartphones. Global chip revenue slumped 12 percent in 2019 before bouncing back with 10 percent growth last year, according to estimates from Gartner, a research firm.

But there is widening optimism that the cycles should moderate because chips are now used in so many things. Philip Gallagher, chief executive of the big electronics distributor Avnet, cited examples like sensors to track dairy cows, the flow of beer taps and utility pipes, and the temperature of produce. And the number of chips in mainstay products like cars and smartphones keeps rising, he and other executives say.

. . .

Chip design software gained popularity in the 1980s to streamline tasks that engineers once carried out with pencils and drafting tables, painstakingly drawing clusters of transistors and other components on chips.

. . .

Mr. de Geus said new growth was coming from what seemed like a problem: a slowdown in Moore’s Law, industry shorthand for the perennial race to shrink chip circuitry so chips do more with less silicon. In response, he said, some companies are using Synopsys tools to design entire systems and bundles of smaller chips that work like a single processor.

During his recent speech to users, Mr. de Geus demonstrated how artificial-intelligence enhancements could allow Synopsys tools to automatically decide how best to situate and connect blocks of circuitry on a chip. A system managed by a single engineer did the work two to five times faster than a team of designers, Mr. de Geus said, while its design used up to 13 percent less energy.

For the full story, see:

Don Clark. “No Shortage Of New Ideas About Chips.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 8, 2021): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 7, 2020, and has the title “Despite Chip Shortage, Chip Innovation Is Booming.”)

French Regulators Give Restaurant Owners a “Sledgehammer Blow”

(p. 12) PARIS — France will ban heaters used by cafes and restaurants on outdoor terraces as part of a package of measures aimed at reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption, the French ecology minister said on Monday.

The French government’s announcement came at a difficult time for cafe and restaurant owners hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, with many largely relying on outdoor dining to comply with social distancing rules.

In an attempt to give businesses time to continue in their recovery and adapt to the new law, the ban will not go into effect this winter, when many experts expect a resurgence of the virus.

In a country famous for its terrace culture, heat lamps running on electricity or gas have flooded outdoor terraces for over a decade, making sitting outside in cold weather not only possible but comfortable. In Paris alone, some 70 percent of cafe terraces are estimated to have heating devices.

. . .

“Restaurant owners were already down on their knees,” said Marcel Benezet, a representative of the GNI-HCR, the country’s main union for cafes, hotels and restaurants. “Now, with this ban, the government is giving us a second sledgehammer blow.”

Mr. Benezet said that as the reopening of cafes and restaurants came with new health restrictions limiting attendance in enclosed areas, outdoor terraces had become the only place where “you can make a little money.”

. . .

Despite the government delaying the ban until next spring, Mr. Benezet said that since no one knew how long the epidemic would last, it could come into force at a time when outdoor seating is still needed to mitigate the economic effects of social distancing rules.

. . .

“We need more time to adapt ourselves,” Mr. Benezet said. “We should not be sacrificed in the name of ecology.”

For the full story, see:

Méheut, Constant. “Lost Winter Warmth: France to Ban Heaters on Cafe Terraces in ’21.” The New York Times (Weds., July 29, 2020): A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 28, 2020, and has the title “Cold Comfort: France to Ban Heated Terraces, but Not This Winter.”)

British Entrepreneur Shattered French Wine Pretension

(p. A23) The world was paying little attention on May 24, 1976, when a small wine tasting was held in Paris at the Intercontinental Hotel. But the echoes of that tasting, later called the Judgment of Paris, have resounded for decades.

The instigator, Steven Spurrier, an Englishman who owned a wine shop and wine school in Paris, had set up a blind tasting of 20 wines — 10 white and 10 red — for nine French judges, including some of the top names in the French wine and food establishment.

. . .

It was hardly thought to be a fair fight. As has been recounted countless times, the judges were thoroughly convinced that California wines were inferior.

“Ah, back to France,” one judge sighed after tasting a Napa Valley chardonnay. Another, sniffing a Bâtard-Montrachet, declared: “This is definitely California. It has no nose.”

When all was done, a shocking consensus revealed the favorite wines to be a 1973 chardonnay from Chateau Montelena and a 1973 cabernet sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Cellars, both in Napa Valley.

The Americans celebrated, the French shrank in consternation, and everlasting fame awaited Mr. Spurrier, who went on to a long career as a wine entrepreneur.

. . .

The Paris tasting might have swiftly been forgotten had not a single reporter, George M. Taber of Time magazine, been on hand to witness the events. His article, “Judgment of Paris,” gave the California wine industry a much-needed boost, lending its vintners international credibility at a time when they were searching for critical approval and public acceptance.

. . .

Mr. Taber, the reporter, in 2005 published a book, “Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine.” A 2008 film, “Bottle Shock,” with Alan Rickman playing Mr. Spurrier, depicted the tasting as the climax of a triumph-of-the-underdog story.

. . .

As for Mr. Spurrier, he leveraged the tasting into different careers in wine, with both triumphs and failures.

. . .

In 1987, the Spurriers bought a farm in Dorset near the south coast of England, and he decided that the chalk soil, similar to what can be found in Champagne and Chablis, was a perfect place for vines.

They did not start planting until 2009, by which time a burgeoning sparkling wine industry had taken root in southern England. Their sparkling wine, Bride Valley, had its first release in 2014.

For the full obituary, see:

Eric Asimov. “Steven Spurrier, 79, a Merchant Who Upended the Wine World With a Taste Test.” The New York Times (Thursday, March 18, 2021): A23.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated March 18, 2021, and has the title “Steven Spurrier, Who Upended Wine World With a Tasting, Dies at 79.”)

The Tabar book mentioned above is:

Taber, George M. Judgment of Paris: California Vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine. New York: Scribner, 2005.