On May 24, 1976, the world of wine was turned on its head when a 34-year-old Englishman organized a blind wine tasting that pitted some of the best French vintages against some unknown Californian wines. Steven Spurrier, who owned a wine shop in Paris, asked nine of France's most exalted experts to compare the wines -- something no one had dared do at a time when French dominance over all things viticultural was taken as fact. When the unthinkable happened and all nine judges awarded top marks to a Californian Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, French winemakers suffered a devastating blow and the era of respectable New World wines was born.

"It was the first crack in the great facade," says Spurrier, now a wine writer and one of the world's foremost authorities on wine. "They thought California wine was Raspberry Ripple or Thunderbird." It was also a defeat French oenophiles couldn't accept. Many of the judges received hate mail for the part they played in bringing down the French establishment, and even today, some still find the memory too painful to speak about.

More than three decades later, the reputation of Californian wine is secure, but the famous Paris Wine Tasting is stirring up controversy once again. The historic event has caught the attention of another Californian industry: two Hollywood movies are in the works. While both are dramas, they're as different as French and Californian wine itself. And this time around, it's Spurrier who's trying to save his own reputation.

The first film, called Bottle Shock, is the Hollywoodized story of Jim Barrett(to be played by Bill Pullman), the owner of Chateau Montelena, which made the winning Chardonnay. The second, Judgment of Paris, is the wine aficionado's version. It's based closely on the book of the same name, written by George Taber, the only journalist present at the tasting. Thrilled at the prospect of a film being made about the event, Spurrier had happily signed over the rights to his life story to the Judgment of Paris producers.

Everything was going smoothly, he says, until he heard rumblings about a rival film in which Alan Rickman plays his character. He was sent a copy of the Bottle Shock script by a Hollywood insider and says it portrays him as a dishonest wine snob who staged the tasting to bolster his reputation and garner publicity for his wine shop and school. "I was absolutely appalled," he says. "Their script is defamatory and it's an invasion of privacy. It's absolute rubbish." Besides being insulting, he says, the script takes liberties with the facts. It has the wine merchant in places he never was, meeting people he never met, and struggling to keep his businesses afloat when in fact they were very successful.

Nadine Jolson, the spokeswoman for Bottle Shock, insists "the character of Steven Spurrier is warm and friendly and charming and entertaining." Spurrier isn't buying it. His lawyers helped him draft a letter asking that all references to his name and businesses be removed. As far as he understands, that's what's going to happen, although Jolson won't comment on the legal status of the request. As for twisting the facts, "We're not making a documentary," she says.

Taber, whose book was optioned after being published in 2005, can't understand why anyone would want to embellish the facts of what is a naturally dramatic story. "If you had a bad story, I could kind of understand," he says. Ironically, he was inspired to write the book nearly 30 years after attending the tasting(and writing a mere four-paragraph story)in part because he'd read so many inaccurate accounts over the years. "The most common one was that the judges had been tricked, that they didn't know they were going to be drinking Californian wines." From conversations he's had with Judgment of Paris screenwriter Robert Kamen(who also wrote Lethal Weapon 3 and The Fifth Element), he's confident his story will be adapted faithfully.

Kamen, who also owns his own California winery, agrees the Bottle Shock script is "a very offensive piece of material." In addition to changing the facts, he says, it includes gratuitous scenes; in one, a fictional character flashes a police officer to get his attention. "It cheapens the whole event," he says. "I call it 'The Three Stooges in Napa.' " Although his film won't begin shooting until next spring, Kamen says he's not worried. "Our film will not hurt by comparison," he says. "You cannot make good wine out of bad grapes; you cannot make a good movie from a bad script."

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