Spurrier (in Berry Bros cellar, 2006): modest, generous and enthusiastic Credit: CLARE KENDALL Steven Spurrier, who has died aged 79, was a debonair wine merchant and critic who was responsible for organising perhaps the most famous event in the history of wine when in May 1976 he brought together nine of France’s most eminent wine tasters and got them to blind-taste and rate a selection of French and Californian wines. The tasting, which became known as the “Judgment of Paris”, pitted four grand and premier cru white burgundies against six Californian chardonnays, and four first and second growth bordeaux against six Californian cabernets. The French, naturally, assumed there could only be one outcome. Indeed Spurrier himself had, he wrote, “rigged the whole thing for the French to win. You don’t take half a dozen unknown Californian wines and put them up against the very best of French wine.”