Alexandra Suich Bass
speaker
194 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Alexandra Suich Bass’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Pulp fiction v the classics: summer reading · 25 May 2026
podcast
And that would not
Фіфті є, омей твариф, в unthinkable happened in the wine world.
Alexandra Suichbass
An English wine merchant named Stephen Spurrier gathered the great names and noses of French wine for blind tasting in Paris.
Among celebrated wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy, he included reds and whites from California's Napa Valley.
Everyone expected the French to win.
But two wines from young, unknown producers won the contest over their French counterparts.
This event would be marked in history as the judgment of Paris.
The judgment of Paris was the shock heard round the wine world.
One French official later described the tasting as our Waterloo.
The French blamed the judges.
One was accused of setting back Burgundian vineyards by a hundred years.
Spurrier became persona non grata in French wine circles and was even kicked out of a winery years later.
Napa's victory had two Balthazar sized effects.
First, it sparked demand for Californian wines at home and abroad.
Exports of American wine more than quintupled between 1975 and 1980.
Second, it stokes the ambition and confidence of new world producers in places like Australia and Argentina that they could one day rival France's great bottles in terms of quality.
Following the judgment of Paris, both American and French wines boomed as they enjoyed new markets and newly minted middle-class wine drinkers.
But 50 years on, the scene is less convivial.
Wine consumption has been declining, with Gen Z and baby boomers alike preferring to drink less but better.
Showing 101–120 of 194 · page 6 of 10
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