Warren Winiarski, Whose Fledgling Cabernet Bested the French, Dies at 95

One of the biggest bangs heard in the history of wine, on a May evening in 1976, caused barely a ripple in the home of Warren and Barbara Winiarski, the proprietors of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley.

The day before, a 1973 Stag’s Leap cabernet sauvignon had won a tasting in Paris that pitted some of the greatest French wines against bottles from upstart California. But when a friend who had been in France called Ms. Winiarski (pronounced win-ee-YAR-skee) to notify her of the victory, she had only a vague idea what the caller was talking about. So she dialed her husband, who was away on business. He, too, couldn’t remember any tasting or grasp its potential importance.

“That’s nice,” he said.

The tasting itself might have remained as inconsequential as it seemed to the Winiarskis if George M. Taber, a reporter for Time magazine, had not been on hand to witness it. His article, “Judgment of Paris,” trumpeted a shocking David-over-Goliath triumph that gave the fledgling California wine business a swift dose of international credibility.

“The unthinkable happened: California defeated all Gaul,” Mr. Taber wrote.

Almost 50 years later, marketers are still using that tasting, re-enacting it countless times, to sell California wines around the world.

It was certainly momentous for the Winiarskis and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, a startup that was virtually unknown before the tasting. There had been little demand for its ’73 cabernet, only the winery’s second vintage, but that was about to change.

“The phone started to ring pretty quickly,” Mr. Winiarski recalled in 1983. It continued to ring for years.