No one in the wine world is more worshipped, feared, followed and reviled than U.S. critic Robert Parker Jr. Few topics provoke more controversy than his 100-point scale for rating wines. Liquor retailers call it the "Parker Effect": a wine he scores above 90 can't be bought, and one below 80 can't be sold. The man has been presented with France's highest awards; raised $20,000 at a charity auction from one bidder who just wanted to dine with him; been slapped with a libel suit; and received death threats. His nose is insured for a million dollars, and his palate is viewed as the vinous equivalent of Michelangelo's right hand.
So just how does a Baltimore lawyer become a wine god? Simple: write a newsletter.
Parker's rise to stardom began with the flood tide of wine appreciation in late-1970s America. The middle class, with more money than previous generations, developed a thirst for the finer things in life. But there were few magazines to guide these fledgling consumers, and so they quickly latched on to Parker's nascent newsletter. Now called The Wine Advocate, it has 40,000 subscribers. And although dozens of wine magazines are published today, and several have larger circulations, none is more quoted on liquor store shelves than Parker's.
Although Parker didn't invent the 100-point scale, he was one of the first wine critics to use it consistently. Consumers took to the ratings because they were easy to understand and their mathematical judgments seemed unbiased. His newsletter soon became the Consumer Reports of wine. In fact, although over-oaked chardonnays aren't quite as devastating as exploding Pintos, Baltimore Bob considers himself the Ralph Nader of wine.
Like Nader, this self-taught wine critic crusades on behalf of consumers rather than cozying up the industry. "When I started, most wine writers existed at the largesse of the wine trade," he explains. "But I went to law school during Watergate, and the professors really beat into us what a conflict of interest was."
Before becoming a celebrity wine critic, Parker was a dairy farmer's son in a small Maryland town. He was born in 1947 to parents who didn't drink wine, or even milk—they were Coca-Cola folk. He was 20 before he discovered wine. During Christmas vacation from law school in 1967, he went to Paris to visit his high-school sweetheart, Pat Etzel, who was studying there. As they were eating on student budgets, Etzel encouraged him to drink the rustic table wines that were cheaper than Coke. Parker was immediately smitten—both with French wines and with Etzel, who has been his wife now for 35 years.
Studying and writing about wine became his part-time passion from then on. Although he still went into law, as counsel to a farm bank, by 1984 his newsletter was generating enough cash to allow him to quit his day job. The Wine Advocate has been described as a triumph of content over style, especially when compared to the glossy, full-colour magazines filled with photos of celebrities holding glasses of wine. Parker's 56 beige-coloured pages, printed in basic typeface, carry no ads or pictures. If the The Wine Spectator looks like a Town & Country-style photo album of a society wedding, then the Advocate resembles the prenuptial agreement. But its simplicity is part of its success: the no-frills format makes it easy for wine stores to photocopy for their shelves, and for subscribers to pass along—which is why its readership is much higher than its circulation.
The newsletter is filled with ratings and descriptions of hundreds of wines, plus commentaries on wine regions. Parker's scores, ranging between 50 and 100, tend to be more extreme than other critics'—lower at the low end, and higher at the high end.
The newsletter's format hasn't changed much from the first issue in 1978, which Parker typed up himself and mailed to 6,500 people on a liquor-store mailing list he bought. Six hundred people subscribed immediately—a wildly successful response rate for a direct marketing campaign, though it disappointed him. Perhaps the response was due, in part, to his first bold stand against the wine trade. Of the 1973 Bordeaux vintage, he wrote: "With few exceptions, the wines are disappointing and overpriced relative to quality." He also gave the premier producer, Château Margaux, only 55 points—calling the venerable Bordeaux "a poorly made wine that should be avoided."
Parker's big stand, though, was when he disagreed with several leading writers of the time and declared the 1982 Bordeaux vintage to be one of the best ever. (He defines it as the vintage that allowed him to leave the law.) Those who believed his assessment scrambled to buy the wines; and eventually, consensus collected on his side, and subscriptions to the Advocate leaped from 7,000 to 10,000. (A retailer from Chicago called him to say that a taxi driver came in with the newsletter, wanting to buy all his cases of the 1982s.) More recently, Parker has declared the 2000 vintage to be one of the best of the century; and cases of the top châteaux are priced well past $5,000 now.
The Bordelaise haven't always welcomed Parker's judgments, though, because he has the annoying habit of ignoring their 1855 classification—the official ranking of châteaux in the Médoc region of Bordeaux. This system was used to set prices, with the result that the top-tier wines could be comfortably guaranteed hefty prices even in poor years. But Parker has turned that hierarchy upside-down, and many Bordeaux vintners now wait to price their wines until he has sampled from their barrels and rated them. (To their horror, on occasion he has even rated some unclassified, small-production "garage" wines, such as dramatic California cult cabernets, over the established châteaux.)
But the French are pragmatic people: their expression "noyer le poisson" (drown the fish) essentially means "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." In 1993, President François Mitterrand presented Parker with the l'Ordre Nationale du Merité, one of the country's top honours. And in 1999, President Jacques Chirac awarded Parker the Legion d'Honneur, an award Napoleon Bonaparte created in 1802, and described him as "the most respected and influential critic of French wines in the entire world." Not even a French wine writer had ever before won the Legion d'Honneur, although other Americans have, including Neil Armstrong, Colin Powell and Ronald Reagan.
Part of Parker's success is that his passion for wine fairly leaps off the pages. When he likes a wine, he tosses around descriptors like "gobs of fruit," "prodigious," "mind-blowing" and "immortality in a glass." Unlike Old Guard writers, he doesn't hedge his opinions. There are no "somewhats" or "appears to be."
British wine writer Jancis Robinson describes him as "completely untroubled by self- doubt," and says that "you don't have to have a keen grasp of the English language to understand his views, or what is a Parker pick." She also thinks he's a purely American phenomenon: Britain could never produce a Parker. "The British traits of self-deprecation and irony are at odds with the Parkesreque pitch of omniscience," she says.
Parker himself puts it this way: "I don't give a damn that your family goes back to before the Revolution, and you've got more wealth than I could imagine. If the wine's no good, I'm gonna say so." The front page of the Advocate trumpets that it "relentlessly pursues the goal of providing valuable, uncensored, totally independent and reliable information on wine, and issues affecting wine quality, to those consumers in search of the finest wines and best-value wines." (Even the newsletter's only graphic, a corkscrew, is designed in the shape of a Crusader's cross.)
Parker's independence is helped by his isolation: he lives far from wine-producing regions, in (as his answering machine announces) "the one-horse town of Monkton, Maryland." That's just outside of Baltimore, and only a few minutes away from where he was born. Until 1996, he worked alone; but his 38-year-old assistant Pierre Rovani now covers Burgundy and several other regions, while Parker focuses exclusively on French and Californian wine.
Parker's independence is financial, too. He buys all the wines rated in the Advocate, to ensure that wineries don't send him free samples of rigged "Parker cuvées." In his opinion, most unsolicited samples that wineries send him aren't usually that good anyway. To taste the top wines, many of which are on allocation because they sell out so fast, he must either purchase them or visit the winery. And unlike some wine writers, Parker pays for all his trips to wine regions.
Several vintners have put Parker's oath of independence to the test. After he sardonically observed that one vintner's wines tasted good with microwaved food, the vintner shipped him an expensive microwave oven. But Parker had it delivered to a local liquor store, and told the vintner to pick it up there or it would be donated to charity.
And when Parker ordered two cases of wine from the Burgundian wine merchant Dominique Lafon, Lafon also included two free cases of the 1987 vintage—knowing that Parker's daughter was born in 1987. But Parker deflected that gesture too: he sent Lafon a cheque for the two cases he'd ordered, and a note saying that he had donated the estimated worth of the 1987s to charity. "Early in my career, producers offered me Napoleonic music boxes, a Porsche and their daughters," Parker says. "But now they know it's a no-go."
Rather than getting too friendly with the wine trade, in fact, Parker can seem downright adversarial. In 1993, one of the largest wine brokers in France, the Burgundian François Faiveley, sued him for libel. In his Wine Buyer's Guide, Parker had written that "reports continue to circulate that Faiveley's wines tasted abroad are less rich than those tasted in the cellars—something I have noticed as well."
Faiveley interpreted this as an accusation of fraud, of selling wine on the market that was inferior to the barrel samples Parker tasted. The case was resolved out of court, and Parker agreed to remove the paragraph from future editions. Burgundian vintners still wonder, though, if the case soured Parker on the region: only about 10 per cent of his perfect 100-point scores have gone to Burgundies, whereas more than 50 per cent have gone to Bordeaux and about 30 per cent to Rhone. And he no longer covers that region, leaving it to Rovani.
But a libel suit is not the worst that Parker has suffered for his candour. After he called the wine of the Bordelaise estate Château Cheval Blanc "a disappointment," the estate manager invited him to re-taste the wine. But when Parker knocked on the door and the manager opened it, the latter's scrappy schnauzer went for the critic—biting his leg hard enough to make it bleed, while the manager stood by and watched. (When Parker asked for a bandage, he was given a copy of The Wine Advocate.)
And in 1990 Parker received ten death threats on his answering machine, promising that he would be killed at his book signings. The caller gave specific times and places, and Parker took armed guards with him to those events—until eventually the FBI traced the calls to a disgruntled New York wine merchant. But they couldn't prosecute: the man hadn't said that he would personally kill Parker, just that Parker would be killed. Parker had a private investigator confront the merchant with the details, and he stopped making the threats. "He's still selling wine in New York and using my scores, but I don't buy any wine from him," Parker says.
In general, the concern is less about Parker being influenced by the industry than about the industry being influenced by Parker. (His literary agent gave him a pillow embroidered with the words: "When Parker spits, the world listens.")
Critics say that winemakers around the world are trying to "Parkerizé" their wines: to make them denser, darker and more alcoholic to cater to his apparent preference for "fruit bombs." (Some of his highest scores, for example, have gone to powerful California cult cabernets such as Harlan Estate, Colgin Cellars and Pahlmeyer.) But some vintners feel that it's not so much Parker they're trying to appeal to, as just the consumer tastes he represents. His reviews reflect the ratcheting-up of our entire sensory environment, from spicier sauces on our food to bigger special effects in movies.
How good is Parker really? Is his judgment infallible? According to Jancis Robinson, his record isn't spotless. "I think Parker underrated the 1990 Bordeaux vintage at the beginning," she says. "As well, certain Bordeaux châteaux that are elegant but not big wines—Château Palmer—are not as celebrated as they deserve to be."
But because of his fame, readers identify with him, learn his preferences and calibrate their palates to his ratings. The problem with most other wine magazines, such as the The Wine Spectator, is that committees often rate the wines, and it's hard to track the range of contributing writers. Distinctive wines often don't fare well in group evaluations, since some people will inevitably find them not to their taste. So it's often the Muzak wines, inoffensive and unremarkable, that get the highest scores.
Parker, however, says that just as he likes people with lots of personality, he likes wine with lots of character—but he doesn't like either people or wines that shout to get attention. He doesn't think table wines should have alcohol levels higher than 15 per cent; and he likes balanced wines that are true to their place of origin rather than to some homogenous international style. He's especially keen on wines produced "naturally," without much filtering.
Clarifying a wine of its sediment is a step that may make it look more appealing and extend its shelf life; but it also strips some of wine's regional character—and in Parker's opinion, "lobotomizes" it. (He has discouraged the practice so sedulously, in fact, that many buyers now view the term "unfiltered" on the label as an indication of quality.)
Parker's reviews also improve the overall quality of wine by recognizing small new wineries—which some say has the effect of making the world larger and more diverse. And in an industry increasingly dominated by a few mega-corporations, such ratings are often the only way for smaller wineries to get recognized.
Anyone lucky enough to find Parker's favour feels the effect almost immediately. After three tough years, the California winemaker Donald Patz was going bankrupt paying taxes while his 1989 wine languished in the warehouse. Critics had condemned the entire Californian vintage, and he wondered if Patz & Hall wines were even needed in the market. So he decided to release the 1990 batch early, and just write off the 1989s. But a friend of a friend gave Parker a bottle of the 1989 to try—and he gave it a rating of 92, and included an effusive note about it on the Advocate's back cover.
"The phone lit up like a Christmas tree," Patz recalls. "Customers were begging to get on our mailing list, and distributors were calling back every fifteen minutes like stockbrokers: 'I've got five cases, I can move five more.' Funny thing though: we've had high ratings from Parker since then, but we've never had quite the same response. We just weren't the hot new label any more, so it didn't have the same impact. But you can't ever discount his influence. He's like Alan Greenspan: when he speaks, people do crazy things."
What kind of crazy things? When Parker gave a high rating to the 1995 Australian shiraz Three Rivers Barossa, winemaker Chris Ringland hiked the price of the 1996 release from $65 to $600—more expensive than the established top-growth 1996 Penfolds Grange, priced at $350. But his 1,000-bottle allocation still sold out in two weeks.
Parker's effect on wines is similar to Oprah Winfrey's on books. (For example, the novel The Deep End of the Ocean originally shipped 68,000 copies—until it was featured on Oprah's book club show, when another 850,000 copies had to be printed to meet demand.) Parker's influence, though, is felt around the globe. Forty wine-producing countries make some 35 billion bottles of wine every year; but his ability to make or break the fortunes of winemakers doesn't seem to faze him. "In the old days you had to make good wine for twenty years to be recognized," he points out. "But now people can come out of obscurity, make really good wines and get recognized instantly. That benefits the consumer—just as it does when I criticize famous estates that make bad wines. The overall quality has gone up."
Parker clearly has more impact with high scores than low ones: a Parker rating of 90 to 100 is said to increase the price of wine at auction by 30 to 50 per cent. But rating wines isn't like rating CDs, books or plays, which are evaluated in their entirety. One wine from any given winemaker is usually part of a portfolio, and every year is different—so the negative impact of a low score isn't as devastating as a bad restaurant review, for instance. Frank Rich, the former New York Times theatre critic known as the "Butcher of Broadway," could reputably close a play with one bad review. But a low Parker score probably wouldn't close a winery.
Still, most vintners don't want to say anything sour about Parker. One exception is Stillman Brown, of Jory Winery in California, who's known for his edgy labels spoofing mobsters, fellow winemakers—and prominent critics. His Reserve Red Zepplelin sported a caricature of a man's head, with "The emperor has no nose" written under it, and a cryptic reference to "Bob."
The sketch didn't look much like Parker, but he was not amused: he threatened Brown with a lawsuit. The matter was dropped, though, and "Bob" remains on the bottle. (But Brown remains undaunted: his web site claims that "no lawyers were harmed during the production of our wine.")
The mocking labels, crazy prices, death threats and dog bites certainly point to Parker's power. Many wine drinkers find the rating system reassuring in its apparent objectivity. But is it so easy to have a shorthand for quality? Can critics really quantify something so elusive and subjective as wine? Can an emotional response be captured in a number; and if so, is an 85 good, very good or great? Is there a difference between wines rated 91 and 92? Even the English language, a more telling tool than our numeric system, has its inadequacies when it comes to precision: is "brilliant" better than "outstanding"?
What is certain is that all this attention is a testament to the power of wine itself, and to how it makes us feel. That's why we need to both quantify and qualify the feeling in a way that we don't with other food and drink. We certainly don't rate lemonade; we don't have beef critics talking about the pastures the cattle graze in; and there are no syndicated lettuce columnists discussing how rainfall affects the leaf set.
Those who critique the critics believe they spend too much time making their opinions look like facts, and too little time illuminating the real facts: whether the wine is well made, and why. Jeff Woody, manager of a New York City wine shop, thinks there's too much wine analysis altogether: "The day the Ladies Home Journal starts rating wines is the day I quit."
So what are we to make of ratings? Really, most of us don't need anything scientifically precise—we just want some guidelines to tell us if a wine is good or bad, what style it is, and what food will go well with it. (And, for new drinkers, some information to give them the confidence to take that precipitous leap from bladder-box swill to bottled poetry.) But we should also recognize that critics are human too, and have off days, blind spots, inconsistencies and prejudices.
As well, a rating is simply one person's opinion of a particular wine at a particular time. In fact, to compensate for the fact that wine changes and evolves over time, some critics (like Parker) re-taste wines every few years to see if the rating should be changed. Parker proudly points out that on such occasions, his scores of particular wines tasted blindly at different times over the years rarely change by more than a couple of points, if at all.
What qualifies critics to be arbiters of vinous taste? Well, apart from a spectacular sense of smell, it's years of experience. Someone once told Parker, "The problem with you guys is that you're like eunuchs: you like to talk about it but you don't do it." And it's true that most wine writers have never even worked in a winery, let alone run one.
Not so Parker. With his wife's brother, Michael Etzel, he co-owns an Oregon winery, aptly named Beaux Frères (French for brothers-in-law). The surprising part of his investment is that it produces the ephemeral pinot noir, the antithesis of his cherished fruit bombs made from the primary grape of Burgundy. "As a winery owner, I'm less forgiving of the BS I hear from winemakers," he says. "I see through it when they say that every vintage is a great vintage, and that they pick between the raindrops."
To eliminate any conflict of interest, Parker states his interest on the front of the Advocate, though without naming the winery; and says that the newsletter will never review his own wines. (In any case, Rovani covers the Pacific Northwest region.) Other critics claim that just working for a winery would bias them toward that region and style of wine—resulting in the occupational hazard for critics known as the "over-conditioned cellar palate."
That's only one of the drawbacks of a career awash in wine. Parker has to carefully safeguard his sense of taste by avoiding foods such as chocolate or spicy dishes that can "screw up my palate." He drinks about ten glasses of water a day to keep hydrated and spritzes his nose regularly with saline solution. As well, alcohol, acidity and the tannins in red wine all corrode the olfactory and nervous systems. Parker's doctors check his mouth and liver three times a year—and yes, a clause in his disability insurance really does insure his nose for a million dollars.
Parker maintains a punishing pace. He tastes 80 wines on a good day or about 10,000 a year (which makes 240,000 since he started in 1978.) Most of us don't have the time or Teflon tastebuds to drink that many wines, never mind the money to buy them—Parker's annual tasting budget is $150,000. So critics screen our wines for us—in the spirit of true humanitarian service.
But how can anyone evaluate hundreds of wines based on a five-second sniff, swirl and spit—without the benefit of swallowing the wine, let alone enjoying it with food? Practice, mostly, and concentration. Parker claims that he can taste with "a hundred screaming kids in a room": when he puts his nose to the glass, he gets "tunnel vision" and all his mental energy is focused on the wine.
"Personally, I can't taste more than thirty to fifty wines a day," says Tom Matthews, editor of the The Wine Spectator. "But it's also a matter of training. Someone who's in shape can run twenty-five miles without getting winded, while someone who's unfit may collapse after a mile." Even being a bulky male helps, the svelte Jancis Robinson points out. "It helps to have a big frame, so men do have an advantage in withstanding more alcohol."
But beyond mere quibbling with the judgments of any one critic, the entire issue of rating wines is controversial. The big debate is whether scores should even be given while the wine is still in its oak cradle, rather than waiting until it's bottled. Many publications score wine when it's been in the barrel only a few months—yet the structure of wine changes significantly in those early months and years. This is particularly true of great wines, which take longer to integrate than simple wines.
And although critics claim that they can detect the structure that gives fine wines their longevity and ultimately their finesse, some drinkers feel that rating a wine in the barrel is like critiquing a meal while the chef is still cooking it. The danger is that early ratings can encourage winemakers to pander to reviewers by sculpting their wines to taste great in the barrel, rather than allowing the natural evolution to occur.
These risks are underscored by the top marks often given to brawny "TEC" wines that make liberal use of technology and extraction. New World wines, in particular, are often accused of producing over-oaked chardonnays and high-alcohol cabernets. These formula-weary wines show a food-processing mentality; and they stand out among other wines like steroid-built weightlifters strutting down a beach of 90-pound weaklings.
There's little doubt the practice of scoring helps both to recognize excellence in winemaking and to weed out faulty wines. But the downside, as Robinson points out, is that "too much coverage is devoted to the most expensive high-scoring wines, and not enough to the good-value wines that everybody drinks." Parker's high ratings for wines with minuscule productions often result in a frenzy for the few available bottles.
Scores can be helpful in liquor stores—particularly in the New World, where merchants aren't usually as expert as they are in countries such as Britain and France. And even when staff is well trained, some consumers don't know what questions to ask, or are shy for fear of looking foolish. But printed wine ratings and tasting notes on the shelves help them to make quick, private decisions, just as they do with movies, music and books. (The downside is when the occasional retailer misuses the information: putting the same slips for wines of different vintages, or more egregiously, for different wines. Parker threatened to sue one retailer for doing just that.)
Those who mindlessly follow Parker's scores, replacing their own judgment with his, are uncharitably dubbed "Parker sheep." Parker himself stresses, in a bolded disclaimer on the Advocate cover, that "there can never be any substitute for your own palate." But in fact, Parker's success is built on the fact that most people don't have the nose or knowledge to just rely on their own palates.
Until recently, wine lovers were able to rate Parker himself on a spoof web site. (His average score was 86.) The site posed the question: "After drinking two-thirds of a less-than-stellar bottle, have you wanted to phone Robert Parker and tell him just what you think of his review?" Visitors could quote from Parker's own tasting notes to describe him, or write their own comments. These ranged from appreciation ("If Parker didn't exist, I'd have to spend a lot more money to find good wine") to condemnation ("Parker's words are a transparent attempt to sound harmonious and balanced, but his ripeness has begun to fade and cellaring him would add no further complexity").
Parker has just launched his own web site (erobertparker.com), but no, he doesn't allow you to rate him. The site includes 45,000 tasting notes and ratings since 1992 in a searchable database. You can also view the entire tasting history of each wine, if Parker has tasted it more than once; or click on a vintage chart, which shows scores and maturity dates for 28 regions over the past thirty years. Then you can select a cell to get a list of wines reviewed in descending ratings-these can be rearranged by price, maturity or spelling.
There are also profiles of winemakers and wine regions; and an online feature called The Hedonist's Gazette, which features Parker and Rovani drinking wines at home—the only thing missing is a web cam. With all this e-info, why would anyone still want to subscribe to the print newsletter? One word: timeliness. New ratings aren't posted until weeks after The Wine Advocate is published, so diehards still need the paper version to scoop latest hot wines.
What are the best wines, according to Parker? He believes that the best-value bottles now come from Priorato and Navarro in Spain; Umbria and Campania in south-central Italy; the southern Rhone Valley and Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France; and the Loire Valley and Alsace. Argentina and Chile will both continue to improve, in his opinion; and in the U.S., the exciting new areas are Santa Barbara in southern California and the Sonoma Coast. However, he says that some of the Napa Valley chardonnays and cabernets (as well as wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy) are "preposterously priced."
As for his own drinking preferences: three wine cellars in his home hold some 20,000 bottles, of which 85 per cent are French wine, 10 per cent Italian, and 5 per cent Californian. (The cellars are guarded by an English bulldog that "looks ferocious, but is totally benign," and a Bassett hound that's "very loud-mouthed, but is really very sweet.") His desert-island picks would include some of the great Côte Roties, Hermitages and Chateauneuf-du-Papes. Maybe the 1947 Cheval Blanc, or Pétrus from his birth year. He used to drink two bottles of wine a day for pleasure, after the professional tasting was over, but cut back to one in his mid-40s. And, he adds, "I like beer, but I hate to admit it."
Sidebar: Wine Advocate
The Wine Advocate is available by subscription only for US$60 per year. To subscribe, write P.O. Box 311, Monkton, MD, USA 21111, call 410-329-6477, or fax 410-357-4504. His web site is erobertparker.com and is accessible for US$99 a year.
Comments? If you’d like to receive Natalie’s bi-weekly wine newsletter, just send her an e-mail at natdecants@nataliemaclean.com. It’s free, there are no ads and your e-mail address will be kept confidential.
Copyright © 2003 by Natalie MacLean. All rights reserved. Please ask permission of the author before copying or using this material.
Chef2Chef News Desk