Steven Spurrier, International Wine Legend, Dies At 79

 It would be difficult to come up with any name in the international wine market as well known as Steven Spurrier, who died this week at the age of 79. Declared by DecanterMagazine “the great man of wine” and “Man of the Year” for 2017, and “a pillar of opinion who everyone respects” by the eminent wine writer  Hugh Johnson, Spurrier was best known for his historic 1976 blind wine tasting called the “Judgement of Paris,” at which top Bordeaux labels were pitted against California Cabernet Sauvignons, the results of which astounded connoisseurs and flabbergasted the French when they showed the Californians to be in the same class as the far more illustrious Bordeaux. From that moment on, California wines had bragging rights, and the reaction caused even French winemakers like Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Joseph Drouhin to begin investing in America vineyards.

The Judgement of Paris was even the basis for a 2008 movie Bottle Shock, in which Spurrier was played as an haute snob Englishman by Alan Rickman. In real life Spurrier couldn’t be more different: Handsome, slender, impeccably dressed, Spurrier had an engaging British wit and, though he took the marketing of wine seriously, he never cared for the folderol that accompanied it.  

He began his career in 1964 in London’s oldest wine merchant Christopher and Company as a trainee, which he parlayed into a wine shop of his own in Paris in 1971 called Les Caves de la Madeleine–a rather gutsy thing for a Brit to attempt in France. Furthermore, he established France’s first wine school open to the public,  L’Academie du Vin. As a teacher he was a great raconteur and ever patient with anyone seeking answers to the mysteries (and follies) of wine. He became a consultant and director of the Christie’s Wine Course in 1988. He also co-founded with Simon McMurtrie the Académie du Vin Library in 2019, publishing articles and books on wines both historic and contemporary. Among his numerous awards Spurrier won Le Prix de Champagne Lanson for wine writing, and was honored as Le Personalité de l’Année for services to the French wine world in 1988. He and his wife Annabella founded his own winery in Bride Valley, in Dorset, with his first vintage in 2014.

Everybody in the wine trade and media knew Spurrier, and I met and was fortunate to dine with him several times over the past four decades. I always found him a refreshing break from the navel-gazing connoisseurs and Masters of Wine for whom wine was more a science of forensics than a pleasure. Like so many well-educated Brits—he, via the Rugby School and London School of Economics—could converse on all manner of subjects, and his wit, while never cutting, was always aimed squarely at pretensions. Spurrier was the kind of jolly fellow who made wine tantalizing and never off-putting. He was the kind of companion who would agree with Victor Hugo when he said, “God made only water, but man made wine.”