Just wanted to thank everyone for making it clear I don’t need to spend my time reading this. Much obliged!
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I think there’s a really interesting article to be written on the effects of Parker in certain regions (in particular, his effect on Burgundy is fascinating) and how he reinforced some aspects of “Parkerization”. This article is not that and I’m not really sure who it’s meant for.
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I’ve always thought that. People around here act like Parker made people like ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines. But he was only successful because he was correct that’s what a large portion of wine drinkers ended up liking better.
Had Parker come along and given high scores to thin greeny herbal wines, those wouldn’t have become what everyone made and bought – Parker just would never have become someone any of us heard of.
He was a reflection of what the public likes, not the cause of them liking it.
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Your take is the correct one.
It’s been an interesting phenomenon.
Any idiot can make rankings. Look at the sports talk world, or music chit chat, but Parker hit the right spot at the right moment and helped the wine hoi polloi direct their funds in a direction away from how this product was traditionally viewed, consumed, and priced.
I’d call it a net negative, but agree with your take, 100%!!!
What he really did was turn much of what oenophiles liked about wines in our own little niche of the world into something that could be summed up by numbers landing somewhere between 80 and 100. (Even the “100 point scale” is as simple and reductive as his palate.) Parker’s palate better matched the popular palate, like the Colonel and fried chicken.
Apologies for my Parker cynicism. I also disdain the designated hitter, Kenny G, pink Rugers, truffle oil, and sucralose. Color me a wine curmudgeon! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
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Just to be clear, I just read the Readers Digest version of Mad magazine and the Wine Expectorator. Sometimes I check out the manga versions of Danielle Steele novels.
Michael Etzel told me that his brother in law and Manfred Krankl were on vacation together…twelve months ago. His back still hurts and for that I have great sympathy.
I friggin’ hate pink Rugers too!
But he didn’t always reflect an exaggerated, stereotypical American palate. And he was a cause of the shift in styles, and not just mirror of his audience.
To be sure, in the early 80s, he dissed underperforming Bordeaux chateaux whose wines were dilute and maybe even underripe. But through most of the 80s, he lauded lots of balanced wines, even if he never had a great appreciation for cooler climate wines, such as Burgundies or Loires.
Circa 1990, however, as he did larger and larger tastings, his palate shifted noticeably to bigger wines, and his scores soared. I subscribed from 1981 to the early 2000s and witnessed the shift, and had ITB friends tell me 30 years ago that, by then, he was tasting 50+ wines at a sitting. (A Barolo maker told me in the late 90s that Parker no longer visited; he asked to have samples delivered to his hotel in Alba.)
Personally, I valued his writings tremendously in the 80s, when he was a breath of fresh air and was a positive influence – drawing attention to areas like the Rhone (he was big on Alsace in those days, too) that were neglected by most wine critics.
But importers and others in the trade will tell you that, starting in the 90s, producers increasingly catered to his tastes. A top French winemaker who didn’t bend that way, at least initially, told me at an event in the late 90s where Parker was present that it was hard to make wines the way he (the winemaker) did not because of Parker. And a very well-regarded importer lamented to a friend of mine that one of the top producers in his portfolio had dramatically altered his style after high scores from Parker in a ripe vintage.
So, he was a cause and not just a reflection of American tastes.
(So much for not wasting time on this! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
)
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This is an interesting take. I agree to some extent but I am not sure we could say that what the public likes was really independent from Parker especially further back in time. We may all have our preferences, but they evolve and change based on what we try, and our expectations. Influential critics by definition influence what we try and therefore our expectations and in turn what we like.
I think the problem with any influential force in wine is that it alters the expectations/ perspective of what wine is “meant” to be. Many people who didn’t like a 98pt wine left thinking they just don’t like wine, because the expert says this is what great wine tastes like. They don’t necessarily think that they just have a different palate than the reviewer. The second perspective is only more common among those who have drank wine more broadly and have a broader notion of what wine can be. So we end up with a survivorship bias, where those who kept buying wine, were those who whose palates aligned with the influential critic. If we were to put the other people (who decided that they probably just didn’t like wine) back into the mix as wine buyers with a different type of wine which they may have preferred, we might have an entirely different landscape for wine.
Ex. Assume 100 people who never really paid attention to the wine they drank see a 98 wine and go out and buy it. 35 of them love it, and go back out buying wine. The others go on to occasionally buy there house wine, or get back to drinking beer or whatever else, thinking this growing wine craze is just some snobbish thing people with money are into. We now have a market driven by those 35 people. Give those same 100 people a very different wine that a different reviewer gave a 98 and you may have a different 35 people going back out to buy more while the original 35 go on buying beer.
I think it is very difficult to disentangle the fact that Parker, partly by coincidental timing, and partly because of his genius, got many many people thinking critically of wine that never would have. Those whose palate aligned with his, were disproportional represented in the future consumer pool.
There are so many different producers, each with their individual histories, local foods, and in the past even more so their own local markets. I think that fact alone has really saved wine from becoming homogeneous. Which was happening, but not by any fault of Parker other than that he had his own natural human bias and too much influence. To be frank, I am somewhat happy that it was him that had that influence when we consider the possible alternatives.
To paraphrase what one of my competitors once said, the favorite meal in America is a cheeseburger, fries and a coke…you really think Savenniere is going to become a big thing??
I always felt Parker reflected what Americans like.
Send me your routing and account numbers and I’ll be in touch
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I certainly wish more of Napa was made in a more traditional style. And in other regions as well. We can certainly lament point chasing producers for giving the public what it wants. We can certainly lay the blame for those big points at RMP’s feet. But he didn’t create the wines that he gravitated towards. It comes off as a bit obsessive to keep circling back to foisting so much of the switch styles onto him. There is a give and take in this narrative people like to ignore in order to make sure he’s the pariah.
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And, from a different angle, Parker’s lack of self-reflection as he was actively pushing his choices (he was not an innocent bystander) makes the view that he was an independent arbiter simply making honest calls hard to square with the image presented in that article. Parker did not engage with his critics in a particularly friendly and open manner, especially since he was usually punching down.
I think Parker’s legacy is very mixed (and very interesting), and like most people with too much power he somewhat suffered for it, but “he shone a mirror to the dark palate of America” isn’t much of a useful article. It’s partially true, sure, but that’s neither the interesting point the author thinks it is nor remotely as true as true as the author thinks.
Except that his palate remained consistent on traditionally ripe wines. As you point out, he rated riper wines well. I think that’s because they played well to the metrics that worked for him in judging the types of traditionally ripe wines he likes. Winemakers picked up on that and made riper wines to mimic what some “great” vintages gave, and it worked. Call it cynical and lazy on the winemakers’ parts, going for the “easy A” with contrived wines, rather than use their honest judgment to make what they felt were the best wines. (To be clear, there are masters of riper wines, so it’s not all gimmicky bullshit sadness.)
Yes, he got to the point he was insisting he was the ultimate authority on objective quality. He attacked dissenting voices. Banning people from his forum, having posts deleted. Insisting anyone who didn’t like a wine he rated highly, or posting a note how a wine fell apart early in his projected drinking window, had some nefarious agenda to knock him down.
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The wines he rated highly (which often meant scores “just” in the mid 90s) in vintages like 82, 85, 86, 89 and 90 weren’t as ripe as vintages in this century, though, and I thought his assessments of Northern Rhones in that era were good. Those wines weren’t out of whack. Not to mention “big” Napa wines in that era, which were probably 14%, maybe 14.4%, instead of 15.5%.
I’d never begrudge someone enjoying the wines that suit their palate, and recognising our varying palate preference is something to be celebrated for the diversity it brings to our hobby.
Parker (and his willing hound Squires) were especially obnoxious in this respect, and that eventually did for their wine forum. Fighting to defend his ‘legacy’ did more harm to it than good.
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The wines got riper and he liked them better. But, Wes is right, his basic criteria were always the same. And one does not have to argue that he was a neutral arbiter to argue that the wine world was only too willing to buy what he was selling. As Chris said, if people didn’t like the wines he rated highly, they wouldn’t have bought them. Sometimes they didn’t. People turned away from Aussie oozies, despite his unfailing support. And people like you and me, who followed his reviews in the 80s and early 90s turned away in the mid-nineties and 00s, when we didn’t like the wines he was recommending anymore. If more people had shared an AFWE palate, he would have been less influential. Finally, though, I am an agonostic on whether he created the taste or the taste found him. I don’t know how one would establish which was which and I don’t think it would change much.
I always admire people who can make a career out of what they love, even more so if they can do it on their own initiative, out of nowhere, as Parker did. I didn’t much like what he was selling after around 95-00, but I never felt the need to hate him for it. His presence on his own wine board was offputting in its pomposity and disdainfulness. But his reviews wouldn’t have been better if he had not been. I have always found Jeb Dunnock an enthusiastic and nice guy in his comments on the web, but I don’t follow his reviews. I wish Parker a nice retirement and I’m happy to be done with him. I find the responses on this board, including the misreading of a rather clear and simple article, always surprising.
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Anybody that went through the debacle of Bordeaux in the 1970s understands how Robert Parker changed things.
While this is a topic that’s been beaten to death, I was a retailer in the 1980s and just the excitement of getting that next Wine Advocate was one of the most thrilling things about being a retailer back then (and you had to get it “first class” in order to beat your competitors to the punch of purchasing ANYTHING that received a 90+ score). He greatly championed the “little” wines from France and importers like Kermit Lynch WAY before anyone else. He did change the wine industry, and wine writing, and for the better I might say.
And I really think the evolution of big wines in this country was inevitable anyways, just look at the beer industry.
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And climate change. People sometimes act like there wasn’t a backdrop of increasingly warmer vintages (with few tools or experience to deal with them) as this was all happening.
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To be clear, my comment about Parker’s reaction to critics wasn’t really about his dealings on internet boards - that’s a very small part of the wine world that’s relevant to us, but not to most other people.
I also don’t think anyone is misreading the article. Those who are criticizing it do so because it’s both simplistic and unoriginal and they don’t agree with its conclusions. More than enough time has passed to be able to consider Parker with a lot more nuance. For someone about whom a book called “The Emperor of Wine” has already been written, a short article like this feels lazy.
One of the paradoxes that the article (quite a few of Parker’s critics) don’t address is that if all he did was make America drink more of what they already wanted, he would never have been as powerful as he was. Parker set agendas and palates more than people want to give him credit (and blame) for. The argument the article makes is, to a large extent, tautological.