Vine to Mind 2026: The Judgment of Davis and the Next 50 Years of Wine

Fifty years ago, a blind tasting in Paris quietly rewrote the story of California wine. On May 24, 1976, a panel of nine French judges, convinced that California wine could not compete with Bordeaux or Burgundy, scored it higher than both. The Judgment of Paris put Napa Valley on the map and changed the way the world thought about American winemaking.

This May, UC Davis marked that anniversary with a four-day gathering that asked what the next fifty years might look like. The 2026 Vine to Mind Symposium, co-organized by the Harvard Data Science Initiative and the UC Davis Departments of Viticulture and Enology and Agricultural and Resource Economics, with support from the Robert Mondavi Institute, brought together winemakers, economists, data scientists, sensory scientists, and wine writers to work through that question from every angle. 

Can You Measure Wine Quality? 

Before the May 18 tasting, a morning workshop in the International Center tackled one of the most contentious questions in wine: what does a score actually mean?

Orley Ashenfelter, professor emeritus of economics at Princeton, laid out the case for treating wine quality as something that can be studied systematically. One of his most famous contributions is a formula that predicts the auction price of mature Bordeaux vintages from weather variables alone, winter rainfall and summer heat, before most experts have tasted a single bottle. At the workshop, he presented newer work that extends those ideas to the fundamentals of fruit quality more broadly, while acknowledging that the sensory side of wine evaluation remains harder to nail down.

Philippe Masset, a finance professor at EHL Hospitality Business School, offered a useful frame for thinking about why. He proposed breaking any wine score into four components: the actual quality of the wine, how individual tasters perceive and scale things differently, the conditions of the tasting itself, and pure noise. Most scores, he argued, are less a direct reading of quality than a noisy combination of all four. Data science tools can help separate signal from distortion, but only to a point, and he noted that machine learning applied to tasting data tends to inherit the biases already present in that data.

Ha Nguyen, an assistant professor of sensory science at UC Davis, closed the session by grounding the conversation in the science of perception. What wine quality means depends fundamentally on who is experiencing it and how, which is not a reason to stop measuring, but a reason to be precise about what you are actually measuring when you do.

The Tasting, the Results, and the Room

The afternoon belonged to the Judgment of Davis itself. Nearly 300 wines from California, France, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, and other regions had been submitted to an open global competition. Two rounds of blind judging in late April narrowed the field to 25 finalists, 12 Cabernet Sauvignon-based reds and 13 Chardonnay-based whites.

Sixteen judges tasted them in the Robert Mondavi Institute's Sensory Theater on May 18, alongside ticketed guests who independently rated the same wines. The panel was one of the most deliberately diverse assembled for a competition of this kind, spanning critics, sommeliers, educators, and winemakers. Among them were Darrell Corti, the Sacramento retailer and wine authority; Karen MacNeil, author of "The Wine Bible" and founder of WineSpeed; Joe Czerwinski, Managing Editor of the Wine Advocate; André Hueston Mack, founder and winemaker of Mouton Noir Wines; Dan Petroski, winemaker at Massican; Madeline Puckette, co-founder of Wine Folly; Liz Thach MW, President of the Wine Market Council; Celia Welch, winemaker at Scarecrow, Corra, and Sylvan Lake; and Wanda Mann, East Coast Editor of The SOMM Journal. 

The range of backgrounds was intentional. Part of the competition's premise was that democratizing wine judgment means more than opening submissions globally;  it means assembling a panel that looks like the world of wine actually does.

Xiao-Li Meng, the Harvard statistician and founding editor-in-chief of the Harvard Data Science Review, described the design. Every wine tasted in random order, with results analyzed by ranking rather than raw averages, and confidence intervals used to determine which differences between wines were real rather than random. The goal was to give the results the statistical rigor that most wine competitions skip entirely. 

Among the reds, Kenzo Estate's "ai," named for the Japanese word for love, not a reference to artificial intelligence, was the definitive favorite, topping both the judges' rankings and the aggregate group scores from ticketed guests. Close behind were Cakebread Cellars, Grgich Hills, Lapostolle from Chile, and Roblar from Santa Ynez. 

In the whites, Domaine Dujac 1er Cru Monts Luisants from Burgundy was highly regarded, but one of the more striking stories of the evening was the competitive showing of wines from outside the usual California-France axis. Giant Steps from Australia, Meadowbrook Winery from New Jersey, Waltz Vineyards from Pennsylvania, and Oldenburg Vineyards from South Africa all had a strong showing. 

Where California Wine Goes from Here

The symposium opened with the question that has followed California since the Judgment of Paris: where does California wine go from here?

Karen MacNeil joined Michael Mondavi and Christine Wente for a conversation moderated by UC Davis librarian Audrey Russek about where the industry is headed. MacNeil, who has been thinking about wine communication and consumer engagement as much as winemaking, drew a connection between cultural relevance and the long-term health of the category. Mondavi, whose family name is bound up with the California wine story, and Wente, whose family has farmed in Livermore since 1883, brought a combined century and a half of institutional memory to a conversation about what the next generation of consumers actually wants.

The afternoon session on consumer demand gave that question a harder edge. Kym Anderson, professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Adelaide, presented data showing that global wine consumption has been declining since 2009 and is now at its lowest since 1960. The premiumization trend is real, with fine wine holding up better than standard-quality bottles, but the overall market direction is down.

Felicity Carter, founder of Drinks Insider, added another layer with findings from a study of people using GLP-1 drugs, medications like Ozempic that are reshaping eating and drinking habits at scale. Her research found three distinct response patterns among users: some stopped drinking altogether, some developed an aversion to alcohol, and some experienced a subtler disruption to the behavioral scripts around drinking. For a category like wine, where ritual and identity matter as much as the liquid in the glass, the implications are significant.

Madeline Puckette, co-founder of Wine Folly, and André Hueston Mack, founder and winemaker of Mouton Noir Wines, were part of an afternoon panel on wine media and communication that grounded some of these big-picture concerns in the practical reality of reaching wine drinkers where they actually are.

The Science of What Comes Next

Day two of the symposium shifted from market trends to the vineyards and labs where the industry's future is being built.

Andrew McElrone, a plant physiologist with the USDA and UC Davis, presented work from the GRAPEX project, which uses satellite data, ground sensors, and machine learning to answer one of the most pressing practical questions in California viticulture: exactly how much water do vines need, where, and when? With the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act putting new pressure on growers across the state, precision irrigation is moving from a nice-to-have to a necessity.

Luis Diaz-Garcia, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, presented his lab's work using AI to accelerate rootstock breeding. Rootstocks determine how vines handle drought, salinity, and soil-borne pests, but they have historically been one of the least-studied parts of the vine. Diaz-Garcia's research applies genomic prediction and machine learning to complex traits such as drought tolerance and root architecture, traits that were previously too difficult to evaluate quickly at any scale. The implications for the California wine industry as it navigates hotter summers and tighter water supplies are direct.

Christine Diepenbrock, a plant scientist at UC Davis, and Vincent Segura of the INRAE institute in France rounded out the breeding session with work on genomic and phenomic selection tools for grapevine improvement. Traditional breeding programs for perennial crops like grapevines can take 16 years from a cross to a registered variety. The tools they described could substantially compress that timeline.

The afternoon turned to AI tools across the supply chain, from vineyard management software to global price data, with Jules Perry of Wine-Searcher presenting 27 years of consumer search behavior as one of the most granular datasets in the industry. A panel discussion on the Judgment of Davis results closed the symposium before the final session of closing remarks brought in voices from South Africa and Stellenbosch University, a reminder that California's fifty-year story is part of a much larger global one.

A Day in Napa

The symposium closed on May 21 with a visit to two wineries whose histories are bound up with the Judgment of Paris itself. At Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, whose 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon topped the reds in 1976, guests tasted current Estate Cabernets in the Great Room before walking the FAY Vineyard and finishing lunch lakeside. At Clos du Val, founding winemaker Bernard Portet, who established the winery in the Stags Leap District in 1972 and whose first vintage was among the wines poured at the original Judgment of Paris, personally led the tasting.

Fifty years on, California wine's place on the world stage isn't the question anymore. The question is what it takes to hold its position as the climate shifts, consumers change, and the tools for understanding both grow more powerful and more complicated by the year.

The 2027 Vine to Mind Symposium will be co-hosted by Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Kaylianne Jordan is a viticulture and enology graduate at UC Davis pursuing her master's degree. She has a background in culinary arts and a passion for sustainable farming and enjoys exploring the connections between agriculture, winemaking, and community. Outside of college, she loves trying out new recipes, and discovering local food spots.