![]() I am told that one of the French judges, Odette Kahn, was so disgusted with the result that she requested the return of her tasting notes. To everybody’s amazement the Californian wines came out as winners, the Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena (Napa valley) coming first in the white wine category and the Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap wine cellars, also in Napa valley, in the red category (beating the Château Mouton Rothschild)! The result of this blind tasting changed the “wine world” forever. Blind tasting of wine means that the judges do not know the origin of the wines they are tasting as the labels/bottles are disguised. Spurrier, in what he thought would be a rather low-key affair, arranged a blind tasting in Paris of French and Californian wines with George Taber (reporter and editor with Time magazine) as a “referee”. ![]() Until then Californian wine was believed by the “cognoscenti” to be far inferior to French wine. ![]() The “blind tasting” was the brainchild of Steven Spurrier, an English man with a wine shop/school in Paris, L’Académie du Vin. In 2005 George M Taber wrote a book: ‘ Judgment of Paris: California vs France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine’. Of course there is a ‘Judgment of Paris in the wine world also. “The judgment of Paris”? Happily since the introduction of nucleac acid testing, the spread of HIV via blood transfusion is rare. In 2008 the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was shared between the virologists Harald zur Hausen (human papillomavirus and human cervical cancer), Françoise Barré– Sinoussi, and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). When the virus that caused AIDS was discovered the battle became serious fueled by claim and counterclaim. The two main players in the race were Professor Luc Montagnier and his laboratory in Paris and Professor Robert Gallo and his laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. In 1984 the linkage between AIDS and a lentiretroviral infection was made and a race began to identify the virus that caused AIDS. Many people developed AIDS after treatment with “factor concentrates” for the treatment of hemophilia and blood transfusions for divers indications. The syndrome was characterized by profound T-cell deficiency and bizarre infections such as Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia formerly known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. It subsequently became clear that the syndrome could affect heterosexual individuals and the name became AIDS. The first descriptions of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the early 1980s referred to a syndrome known as gay-related immune deficiency. A different “judgment of Paris” happened in medicine.
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