Melt 1976: A Napa Wine Dinner

It’s 1976. The table is set. Fondue waits at the center, wine is open, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is spinning, and the first guests are about to arrive.

On Sunday, October 25, Wedgewood is going back 50 years for Melt: 1976. We’re partnering with Napa Valley’s Matthiasson to create the complete wine pairing for the evening — an especially fitting collaboration for a year that gave us the Judgment of Paris and changed the way the world thought about American wine.

We’re taking the dishes, bottles, records and rituals that defined the era and looking at them again through the Wedgewood lens: exceptional ingredients, thoughtful technique, great cheese, and serious wine.

The goal isn’t to recreate the past. It’s to remaster it.

The Wine
Five courses. A complete Matthiasson pairing. One extraordinary year.

For MELT: 1976, Matthiasson is creating the complete wine pairing for the evening. Steve and Jill Matthiasson are known for elegant, food-driven California wines built around freshness, acidity, structure and restraint — a style that deliberately looks back to the balanced California wines of the 1970s and ’80s, before Napa became synonymous with bigger, riper, more heavily extracted wines. Their wines reflect the kind of California winemaking that helped define the era.

And the connection to 1976 runs deeper than style. In May of that year, a blind tasting in Paris put California wines alongside some of France’s most celebrated bottles. California took the top spot in both the red and white categories, stunning the wine world and permanently changing the way American wine was perceived. The event became known as the Judgment of Paris.

Matthiasson farms its Linda Vista Chardonnay in Napa’s West Oak Knoll area, in the same pocket of Napa where Chardonnay fruit associated with the 1976 Paris-winning wine was grown. Steve Matthiasson also brings serious wine-world pedigree of his own, including multiple James Beard Award nominations, Winemaker of the Year honors, and decades of work with some of Napa’s most respected vineyards and wineries.

The Judgment of Paris becomes the thread through the pairing — a story of French tradition, California ambition, and the moment American wine stepped onto the world stage.

The Food
Nostalgia, remastered

Think dinner-party classics and special-occasion restaurant food from an era when dinner still knew how to make an entrance. Shrimp cocktail. Deviled eggs. The Wedge. Proper fondue. Duck à l’Orange. Salmon en Croûte. Black Forest Baked Alaska.

Familiar ideas, reconsidered with beautiful ingredients, exceptional cheese and the way we like to cook now. The menu is designed to feel nostalgic without being literal — recognizable enough to bring back a memory, polished enough to feel entirely Wedgewood.

The Music
Because playlists didn’t exist

1976 also happened to be an absurdly good year for music. Stevie Wonder. Bowie. The Ramones. ABBA. Boston. Peter Frampton. The Eagles. ELO. Soul, funk, disco, punk and rock all happening at once. So music won’t simply play in the background.

Every course will be paired with an album released in 1976, selected to match the mood and character of that moment in the meal. Think of them as liner notes for the table.

One Year. One Dinner. One Incredible Winery.

MELT: 1976
Sunday, October 25

Full five-course dinner + complete Matthiasson wine pairing included.

High-top seating · $145 Cheese bar seating · $165
Dress for 1976 if the mood strikes