(Wine-Spectator) - The Judgment of Paris tasting was the single most important event in the history of wine. In a 1976 blind tasting, French judges chose Napa Valley wines over the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. The repercussions still echo to this day. But what if it never happened?

Some have suggested that a different system of counting the votes in 1976 could have resulted in French wines winning. Or perhaps Steven Spurrier couldn't get the American wines to Paris on time. Or maybe Time magazine's George Taber hadn't gone on a lark to cover it. If Taber hadn't been there, the French surely never would have admitted what happened.

Let's engage in some speculative fiction and create an Earth-2 where on May 24, 1976, only the last point differs: the tasting happened, but Time never reported it.

Spurrier will tell people in his London wine shop about the tasting – with no Time headline, it's just a tasting he once held – for the rest of his career, but the details grow foggy. He doesn't write a wine column yet, and by the time he does, he soft-sells the details – California wines stood up well against their French counterparts. It's just not the same thing, and on Earth-2 the Paris tasting becomes like one of Robert Mondavi's many tastings of his Napa Cabernets against Bordeaux first-growths: interesting, but not definitive.

Here's a chronological version of the wine world on this Earth-2.

1978: Robert Parker starts the Wine Advocate (like on our Earth-1). He concentrates on Bordeaux and the Rhône and doesn't begin reviewing California wine until the late 1980s. Meanwhile, French vintners who were at the Paris tasting are quietly buying vineyard land in Napa Valley.

1980: Nearly half of the white grapes crushed in Napa Valley are French Colombard; more than a quarter are Chenin Blanc. (True facts from Earth-1.) Mondavi urges Napa vineyard owners to plant a higher quality white grape that is better suited to the terroir, and almost nonexistent in Napa: Sauvignon Blanc, to go with the Semillon that's already there. Nobody plants Chardonnay (the 18th most-planted white grape in Napa on Earth-1 at that time) because that's a Burgundy grape and why would you plant that in a valley that models itself on Bordeaux?

1983: Diamond Creek owner Al Brounstein releases his 1978 Lake Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon with the unheard-of price of $100. "It's a great wine and it's worth the money," Brounstein says. The market disagrees. "I'm not going to review it, because no Napa Valley Cabernet is worth $100," Parker writes. "They're just not at the same level as the great wines of Bordeaux." The wine sits unsold for years and serves as a cautionary tale; no other vintner tries to charge $100 for a Napa Valley wine again until the Internet boom economy of the year 1999. The good news is this means Diamond Creek still has this wine in its cellar in 1999 and it's totally rocking. On Earth-2.