Victories Over Hubris

What do wine and the piano have in common? They each cut down to size two nations that had arrogantly assumed their own greatness. The Soviet Union was convinced of its global superiority in classical music in the 1950s and '60s, at the height of the Cold War. Blinded by this hubris, they launched the quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow obviously destined, they thought, to be won by them. Much to their shock, a brilliant American named Van Cliburn won the inaugural competition in 1958. The Soviets were so stunned they had lost that they reportedly needed Premier Khrushchev to approve Cliburn’s victory, in real time. RIP Van Cliburn.

This keyboard conquest is reminiscent of the similar, absolute certainty of the French in 1976 – at the Judgment in Paris – who knew their wines were the best in the world - unquestionably. They considered upstart California reds and whites the equivalent of, as my husband likes to say about bad wines, the fluid used to degrease the ball joints on a Citroën. They were only too happy to pit inferior Napa Valley wines against their own in a blind tasting. Of course, in a moment that forever put Napa Valley on the map, Chateau Montelena won the Chardonnay competition and Stag’s Leap won the Cabernet Sauvignon battle. The French judges, indeed the Fifth Republic itself, must have been as stunned as their Soviet counterparts two decades earlier. Hubris blinds us to possibilities, which makes it a self-defeating proposition. Twitter @jessicamcwade