It was the tasting that revolutionized the wine world.

Forty years ago today, the crème de la crème of the French wine establishment sat in judgment for a blind tasting that pitted some of the finest wines in France against unknown California bottles. Only one journalist bothered to show up – the outcome was considered a foregone conclusion.

“Obviously, the French wines were going to win,” says journalist George Taber, who was then a correspondent for TIME magazine in Paris. He says everyone thought “it’s going to be a non-story.”

Taber did show up — as a favor to the organizers. And he ended up getting the biggest story of his career: To everyone’s amazement, the California wines – reds and whites — beat out their French competitors.

“It turned out to be the most important event, because it broke the myth that only in France could you make great wine. It opened the door for this phenomenon today of the globalization of wine,” Taber says.

The Judgment of Paris, as that May 24, 1976, wine tasting has come to be known, began as a publicity stunt. Steven Spurrier, an Englishman who owned a wine shop in Paris, wanted to drum up business. So, prompted by Patricia Gallagher, his American associate, Spurrier decided to stage a competition that highlighted the new California wines they’d been hearing so much about.

Spurrier tapped nine of the most respected names in French gastronomy for the job. They included sommeliers from the best French restaurants in Paris, the head of a highly regarded French vineyard, and Odette Kahn, the editor of the influential Revue du vin de France (The French Wine Review.)

As the sole journalist present, Taber had a lot of access, and he had a list of the order of the wines being served during the tasting. The judges didn’t. He watched as they swirled and spat.

At one point, Taber says, a judge – Raymond Oliver, chef and owner of Le Grand Véfour, one of Paris’ great restaurants — sampled a white. “And then he smelled it, then he tasted it and he held it up again, [and] he said, “Ah, back to France!” Taber recalls.

From left: Patricia Gallagher, who first proposed the tasting, wine merchant Steven Spurrier, and influential French wine editor Odette Kahn. After the results were announced, Kahn is said to have demanded her scorecard back. “She wanted to make sure that the world didn’t know what her scores were,” says George Taber, the only journalist present that day. Courtesy of Bella Spurrier hide caption

toggle caption Courtesy of Bella Spurrier

Except it was a Napa Valley Chardonnay. The judge didn’t know that. “But I knew,” Taber says. And once he realized what was happening, Taber says, “I thought, hey, maybe I got a story here.” Decades later, he penned The Judgment of Paris, an account of that day and its aftermath.

When the scores were tallied, the top honors went not to France’s best vintners but to a California white and red – the 1973 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena and the 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. (A bottle of each now resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)

Taber says the results shocked everyone. When it was over, Kahn unsuccessfully demanded her scorecard back – according to Taber, “she wanted to make sure that the world didn’t know what her scores were.”

Wine writer David White says the tasting was a major turning point for the wine industry. “The 1976 judgment totally changed the game,” says White, who writes the popular wine blog Terroirist and is the author of the forthcoming book, But First, Champagne: A Modern Guide to the World’s Favorite Wine.

While winemaker Robert Mondavi played a major role in making California the wine powerhouse it is today, the Paris tasting was equally influential, White says. As the late Jim Barrett, part owner of Napa Valley’s Chateau Montelena, told Taber back in 1976, the results were “not bad for kids from the sticks.”

And it wasn’t just California that was transformed. The results “gave winemakers everywhere a reason to believe that they too could take on the greatest wines in the world,” White says.

In the aftermath of the tasting, new vineyards bloomed around the U.S. (think Oregon, Washington and Virginia) and the world — from Argentina to Australia.

The Judgment of Paris prompted the world’s winemakers to start sharing and comparing in a way they hadn’t done before, says Warren Winiarski, the Polish-American founder of Stag’s Leap, whose Cabernet Sauvignon took top honors among the reds in Paris.

As a result, he said at a recent Smithsonian event in honor of that long-ago tasting, “the wines of the world are better, the wines of France are better.”

Which means the world’s wine lovers were the real winners that day.

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Khaled Ali Hassanin opens his silver minivan and pulls into Cairo’s busy traffic. He is a freelance driver. He used to ferry foreign tourists all around Egypt as a staff member of a tour company. It was a great job.

“There was so much work. I never worried about money. If I spent one [Egyptian] pound, I’d get two back. We had more work than we could handle,” he says.

Until 2011 — that’s when mass protests led to the overthrow of the dictatorial Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Hundreds were killed. Foreign tourist visits, which had reached 14.7 million in 2010, according to government figures, dropped by 30 percent to 9.8 million. Last year the number of foreign tourists was even lower, 9.3 million. Hassanin spent savings he had accumulated during the good times to support his family — until he gave up hope on tourism.

“Business dropped; the company closed down. The cars I’d drive tourists in were parked off in some garage,” he says. “I have responsibilities, I have children, so I had to go find something to do.”

The crash last week of an EgyptAir passenger plane flying from Paris to Cairo is the latest blow to the industry, which once made up over 11 percent of Egypt’s GDP.

Hassanin is one of many former employees in the tourism industry who are working more in other jobs and earning less. He now competes with many other drivers who hawk rides around or outside Cairo. He earns half of what he used to and skimps on himself to pay for his family’s sports club membership and English classes for his kids.

Even before the 2011 revolution, bombs periodically struck high-profile tourist sites in Egypt. Adel Adrees, a tour guide for 30 years, says visits would bounce back within a few weeks, even after a fatal attack.

“Before 2011, the troubles we had here in Egypt, it was internal,” he says. “Nowadays the problem is regional.”

It is true that there are ongoing wars in the region. But Egypt has had its own special problems. In the past nine months, the military killed 12 Mexican tourists and their guide. Authorities claimed forces thought the group were Islamic militants. The body of an Italian student was found in a ditch with signs of torture, creating a public feud with Italy. A mentally ill man hijacked a plane from Cairo to Cyprus with a fake suicide belt. And a Russian jet that took off from the Egyptian resort town Sharm el-Sheikh exploded midair. Russia has suspended all flights to Egypt.

But Hassan el Nahla, head of Egypt’s tour guide association, brushes all these issues aside.

“All this is true, but some of them are out of our hands,” he says. Terrorism, he points out, happens in many countries.

And while tourism isn’t making the same contribution to the local economy, it still provides huge revenues. International visitors to the country’s snorkeling beaches and ancient tombs brought in more than $12 billion annually in 2010. Last year, the figure had fallen to $6.6 billion.

Egypt’s government is starting a multimillion-dollar effort to woo back foreign visitors. Part of the money will go to boosting security and another part will go toward improving Egypt’s image through international ad campaigns that highlight tourist spots. Tourism is a fragile business, many in the business in Egypt say, and the most important thing to build it up is the perception of safety.

Yesterday, at Egypt’s perhaps most famous attraction, Australian tourist Stephen Booker climbed backward down a ramp into the burial chamber of a small queen’s pyramid at Giza. There was no line.

At the pyramids of Giza, Mahmoud Tayar and his camel, Charlie Brown, are gloomy about the steep drop in tourism to Egypt over the past five years. Emily Harris/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Emily Harris/NPR

He says the EgyptAir crash last week does not worry him. “Not for my personal safety,” he says. “But I did feel sorry for the Egyptians, because they’ve taken one hit after another.”

Mahmoud Tayar knows what he means. He offers camel rides to pyramid visitors.

“There are a lot of camels to compete with but in good times I’d get 30 customers a day,” Tayar says. “Now it’s three, four, sometimes zero a day.”

Tayar says his camel, named Charlie Brown, feels the loss of business too. Charlie Brown, beside him, moans and bleats. “He told you ‘no business,’ ” says Tayar, translating for his camel. ” ‘Busy no. No business.’ “

But for visitors like Booker, that can also be a good thing. “It’s certainly better for getting cheap tours, that’s for sure,” he says. “There’s some quite cheap deals because they just aren’t getting the people in.”

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Before the mortgage crisis hit, real estate seemed like a sure bet. Pretty much anyone could buy a house: no money down, thousands of square feet, second and third vacation homes were not out of the question. Then the bubble burst.

Homeowners across the U.S. confronted the reality that their houses were worth a fraction of what they paid for them. Now, a decade later, even though the recession is over, more than six million homeowners are still upside down on their mortgages.

This week on For the Record, we hear the stories of two people who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis – and how they’re coping today.

Brian Burns, Las Vegas

For 26 years, Brian Burns watched Vegas grow. He saw the desert dirt roads transformed by construction projects. The land was available and cheap. By 2004, housing prices soared.

“The builders couldn’t keep up with the demand,” he says. “Land prices went thru the roof.”

Burns and his then wife had bought into the dream. They lived in a huge house he estimates was 3,500 square feet. “There were parts of the house you never even saw – that’s how big it was,” he says.

When a realtor friend convinced him to sell, he was blown away by the profit he turned.

“That house that I bought for $250,000, my friend sold for $645,000 three years later,” he says. “I had never had remotely that much money in my life. Probably never had more than $10,000 to $15,000 in the bank before. And I took $40 out one time and I showed my friend my ATM receipt and it said $228,000 balance. And we just looked at each other and laughed, it was ridiculous. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

He decided to keep it in the bank and buy another, smaller house in a brand-new development in the town of Henderson, Nev. Sure, the tan, stucco tract-style housing didn’t have a whole lot of charm, but Burns didn’t care. He convinced some of his friends to buy other houses in the neighborhood. He had cash in the bank, excellent credit, and he put no money down.

Before we return to the second half of Brian’s story, let’s bring in a second voice.

Guillermo Galindo, Medford, Mass.

In 2005, Guillermo Galindo and his wife bought their house in Revere, Mass., for $450,000. They put about 5 percent down and ended up with a manageable monthly mortgage payment of about $2,000.

He worked delivering medical supplies, and they got monthly payments from a family who rented the unit on the second floor. Galindo and his wife lived there for a few years with their baby daughter, and life felt pretty stable.

But that security began to crumble in 2008, when his employer started cutting his hours. The interest rate on his adjustable mortgage started creeping up. Then, he lost more income from his second floor tenants.

“The people upstairs, to top it off, this girl had a baby and then she had problems with her husband,” Galindo says.

Eventually, the young woman’s husband abandoned her and the baby.

“At the end she was just was left alone and she stopped paying rent,” he says.

He wouldn’t kick her out, but that meant Galindo was now really struggling to make his mortgage payments. Around the same time, he found out that his home had lost a huge amount of its value, about 50 percent, so he got in touch with his bank hoping to work out a deal.

“They asked for more papers, I send them all. It was back and forth, back and forth, until they said they couldn’t help me, that the price was that. And they couldn’t do anything,” he says.

Across the country, Brian Burns had also seen the value of his home plummet in Las Vegas.

“I think everybody’s dream, when you are a normal person — not super rich, not super poor — is that your home is kind of your biggest asset,” Burns says, “that you feel like, ‘I’m going to play by the rules, I’m going to pay my mortgage, it’s just going to continue to increase in value.’ Maybe not by leaps and bounds, but by no means should it be worth a third of what you paid for it. And it started to scare everybody.”

He found out that the house he bought for $320,000 was now worth only $140,000.

At the same time, his work as a graphic designer was drying up. Eventually, he chose to stop paying his mortgage. He didn’t feel good about it.

“I wasn’t raised that way to not honor your obligations, and do the right thing and pay your bills on time,” he says. “My credit score was perfect. In fact, when I bought that little house, the guy said, ‘We’re willing to give you no down because you have one of the best. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and your credit score is 850 points or something like that and I’ve never seen one that high.’ “

He could have used his savings to keep paying his mortgage payments, but he thought that was a bad idea.

“The analogy I use back then is, I’m not going to pay Mercedes prices for a Kia. Why would I pay $320,000 for a house that’s never going to be worth that?”

The decision destroyed Burns’ credit, he let the bank take his house and he moved to Oregon to start over again.

Meanwhile, Guillermo Galindo was in a different situation because he didn’t want to leave. His life savings were wrapped up in this house, and that’s where he wanted to raise his daughter.

“I thought I was going to pass [the house] on to my daughter,” he says. “I thought it was going to be something that would last for my remaining life.”

He kept talking with the bank, trying to figure out how to stay. Eventually they sent him a letter saying they were foreclosing. He fought it for another five months and finally said, fine, take it.

They gave him $3,000 and he handed over the keys.

“It was very depressing for me,” Galindo recalls. “I was trying to show my best face to my wife and my daughter. I remember we had a dog because that was one of the things that I promised my daughter if we had our own house … And it was really, really, really heartbreaking for me to find the words to tell my little one, was probably 3 years by then, that we were going to have to get rid of the dog. So, believe it or not, I wasn’t even thinking on anything else but that how we were going to tell her her dog was gonna have to go.”

Today, Brian Burns is back in Las Vegas, where he rents an apartment with his fiancée. They feel really gun-shy about buying anything, mainly because it doesn’t seem like the housing crisis is over in Vegas. Roughly 20 percent of homeowners are still underwater there, and it doesn’t look like a recovery.

“I drive up into suburbia, and there are streets still of empty houses. No curtains, no nothing, weeds in the yard,” Burns says. “There are still a lot of empty houses in this town.”

Over in Medford, Mass., Guillermo Galindo also rents an apartment. There are two main rooms — one where Guillermo and his wife sleep, the other they use as a daycare facility. When all the children leave at 6 p.m., Guillermo’s now 12-year-old daughter converts it into her bedroom.

“My daughter is still thinking about having a house, and the first thing she’s going to do is to get a dog,” he says. “I feel very proud of her. She’s getting high honors. She’s been adapting really good.”

Galindo’s credit rating is still in the tank because of the foreclosure. And they don’t have any money for a down payment, so buying another house is not an option right now, and might not be for a long time.

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