The year is 1976, Paul McCartney's "Wings" are top of the Billboard charts, and European wine is about to face its biggest fight against America's "kids from the sticks".
The "Judgement of Paris" — an event that uprooted the reputation of French wines in favour of Californian underdogs — would shift the wine market between the competing countries.
Now, as European alcohol faces a new threat from a looming Donald Trump tariff war, here's how a blind taste test almost 50 years ago first ignited a rivalry between the United States and Europe.
The blind taste that changed the game
A Parisian taste test between French wines and their Napa Valley counterparts seemed so ludicrous in 1976 that few journalists even showed up.
The exception was Time magazine's George Tabar, who viewed the event with skepticism.
"Everybody knows that French wines are going to win, so why waste a day?" he recounted in 2016.
"It's the giant and the little guy. Nobody took it seriously."
At the time, Napa Valley was barely a burgeoning wine destination.
Some estimates show there were only 330 wineries in California in 1975, and most were considered eons behind their French rivals in Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Not only was Californian wine unpopular overseas, the test's creator, Steven Spurrier, said it "did not exist" as far as the French were concerned.
The British-born Mr Spurrier believed it an unfair assessment and, imbued with a sense of wine justice, he put eight wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux up against 12 Californian rivals.
To equal out the contest, he made the then-unusual step of hiding the labels.
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