French learn about wine from Brits

If you eat out in London, then your ears are certain to be attuned to the pleasing distortions of the French accent.

Restauration runs in Gallic blood, of course. British restaurant staff need to be taught, laboriously and fallibly, practices which any Frenchman or woman would instinctively know by having bathed daily since birth in France's culture of food service and food enjoyment.

You might, therefore, assume that the same would go for wine, especially in Paris. The prospects for a Briton looking to sell wine to Parisians seem as bright as the hopes of a junior Gideon with a suitcase full of bibles checking onto a flight to Mecca.

Yet, strange to relate, the British presence on the Paris wine scene is significant. Still stranger to relate, a single Briton was responsible for introducing the concept of wine education for the general public to Paris, and for jolting the French out of their historical complacency concerning the supremacy of their own wines. He also trained the two men who, today, are France's leading wine journalist and France's leading wine taster. He was a stone lobbed into the brackish millpond of the Paris wine world in 1970. Even today, the ripples continue to lap at the banks.

Steven Spurrier is a legendary, Pimpernel-like figure within the wine world, but little-known outside it. He opened a shop called Caves de la Madeleine in a passageway called Cité Berryer (25 Rue Royale) in 1971. "There was no wine trade in Paris at all in those days," Spurrier remembers. "It's hard to believe now, but I was the first wine shop ever to sell Lafon's white burgundies in Paris. The others all thought it was too expensive. I was Marcel Guigal's first client in Paris."

DEMAND, initially from Americans, led to the opening of the Académie du Vin; the French were soon flocking in, thirsty for knowledge as well as wine. Journalist Michel Dovaz offered to teach; an early student was Michel Bettane, now France's taster-guru. A restaurant followed, the Moulin du Village, and eventually a wine bar called the Blue Fox, too. All in the same passageway: this was Spurrierville.

Spurrier's finest hour came in May 1996 when he organised what proved to be the most important blind wine tasting of the second half of the 20th century - the "Judgment of Paris", as wine classicists have dubbed it. This was the occasion when a panel of distinguished French tasters and restaurateurs declared, to their own subsequent horror, a Californian Chardonnay superior to the best white burgundies, and a Californian Cabernet Sauvignon finer than top red Bordeaux like Mouton-Rothschild 1970 and Haut-Brion

1970. It provided the kick in the pants which the French needed to invigorate their own winemaking; it simultaneously gave Californian and other New World wine producers self-respect. Spur-rier was ostracised by many of his suppliers afterwards, though all he meant to do was show the French what other wine nations were capable of.

He has been back in Britain since the end of the Eighties, but his influence lives on in Paris via those who worked with him. Mark Williamson, for example, who owns and runs Willi's Wine Bar at 13 rue des Petits Champs and the much larger restaurant Macéo next door, was a Spurrier disciple. So too was self-proclaimed "wine gipsy" Tim Johnston, who owns Juveniles just round the corner from Willi's at 47 rue de Richelieu. Another apostle was David Cobbold, an old Etonian whom Spurrier enticed back to wine from French provincial goat-farming and cabinet-making. He is now a Paris-based wine educator and consultant. Former Herald Tribune sub-editor James Lawther is the only one of the Spurrier gang to have become a Master of Wine; he now lives in Bordeaux and works as a journal-ist. If you treat yourself to a lunch at the Tour d'Argent, meanwhile, one of the great Parisian gastronomic monuments, you'll find the head sommelier comes from Guildford and is called David Ridgway.

"Yes," says Ridgway, "there is this wonderful myth in France that the British are very knowledgeable about wine." David Cobbold, too, finds that the French business clients for his wine evenings are not surprised to discover he's an