On May 24, 1976, a wine tasting took place in Paris at the InterContinental Hotel that wine-and-food critic Anthony Dias Blue has called the most important in the 20th century. Englishman Steven Spurrier, who owned a wine shop and wine school in Paris called Caves de la Madeleine, staged the event. He was in his 30s and regularly did things that the French wine establishment never thought of trying. His wine school, for example, was the first ever in Paris. Once he had a comparative tasting of the five famous French First Growths, something the masters of French wines never did.