Thursday, April 30 2009

Doing What He Does Best

It'd leave a sour taste in anyone's mouth

It's no secret that I'm not BFF with Robert Parker. He is, after all, pretty much the most pernicious influence on the world of wine today, dumbing down good wine, pumping up bad wine, and generally distorting consumer perceptions about what wine is and should be--all to his personal profit.

And now he's published his ratings for Bordeaux, and the wine world is Parkerised and broken. According to Decanter Magazine:

Chateau Lafite 2008 has shot up in value after last night's release of Robert Parker's scores.

The American critic published his verdict, comparing it to both 2005 and 2000, at around 11pm UK time last night.

He writes in the Wine Advocate newsletter, 'It did not take me long to realize that the 2008 vintage was dramatically better than I had expected...excellent, with a number of superb wines that are close to, if not equal to the prodigious 2005 or 2000 vintages.'

According to Liv-ex, Chateau Lafite – one of his wines of the vintage – was trading at £2000 per case last night, and by this morning was changing hands for £3,500.

Bleah! Tastes like a Baltimore lawyer.

That's mind-bending. The wine is of the quality it always was before he made his pontifical pronouncements, but so strong is his neuro-linguistic programming on the (feeble) minds of more-money-than-sense wine enthusiasts, the price of a case of wine went up by the equivalent a couple of months worth of mortgage payments.

Graph from Liv-ex Wine Market

What's the deal? Why so much power from such a leather-palated self-promoter? According to Michael Steinberger in Slate Magazine, it's the grip of the 100-point scale that does it.

What has really given Parker his stranglehold over the wine industry is the 100-point rating system he employs. Other critics have embraced this approach, but Parker pioneered it, and no one has used it to greater effect. Simply put, it is a device that creates the illusion of scientific rigor. It is one thing to award a wine an A, or five stars; this leaves some room for interpretation. However, to say that a wine merits 88 points indicates a level of precision that just cannot be achieved, except in Parker's own mind.

For instance, Parker bestowed 89 points on the 1995 Haut-Batailley. Why 89 and not 90? He might answer that he found the finish to be a bit attenuated. Does that mean the aftertaste endured only 19 seconds when he thinks it should have dwelled in his mouth for 25? How many points are deducted because of the 6-second gap? Moreover, who's to say how long the flavor should linger, and even if there were an agreed-upon duration, is this something that can be reliably measured? And just how important is the finish to a wine's performance, anyway? You get the idea–the slightest amount of poking quickly brings the 100-point concept collapsing in on itself.

And yet this method has proved to be a masterstroke. Consumers no longer buy wine, retailers no longer sell it; instead, they buy and sell scores. A wine rated 90 or above will fly off the shelf; below 85 and it is headed for the close-out bin. For winemakers, the difference between a prosperous year and a so-so one is often just a handful of Parker points; as a result, a lot of time and energy is invested into making sure that Parker leaves the tasting room satisfied. The most extreme examples of this are the California "cult" wineries and the Bordeaux "garagistes." These are producers who craft microscopic quantities of turbo-charged, ultra-Parkerized wines that, not surprisingly, tend to fetch his highest scores and sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle.

. . . a huge number have simply made his preferences theirs or have substituted his for theirs. Parker has spawned a generation of lemmings. This may not have been his intent, but it is his legacy: Untold thousands of wine drinkers have come to believe that his judgment is more trustworthy than their own.

No wonder the French think he's Satan.

95 points from Parker! Let me at that bucket!

I emancipated myself from Parker nearly ten years ago. I decided that if I discovered that a wine had a Parker rating higher than 85 points I would not buy it nor drink it, and if any wine advertised its Parker rating heavily I'd avoid it at all costs. It's served me extremely well: his taste and mine will never coincide (I simply can't visualise myself making a cocktail of blackberry jam and grain alcohol) and I've gotten to try some delicately balanced, well-made wines with crispness, trueness and terroir to their credit.

Plus, Parker will never review a bottle of consumer-produced wine as long as he lives, which keeps me warm at night, knowing I've got something he'll never understand--good wine and a vast sense of satisfaction at making something wonderful, just for myself.

Posted by Tim AT 7:30PM

2 Comments

Post A Comment

Email