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One Robert Parker

May 10, 2009 by  
Filed under Wine Geeks, Wine Media, Wine Reviews

7 Comments

Robert Parker and his Wine Advocate have shaped wine markets and consumer behavior more than any other contemporary critical influence.  The newsletter continues to fulfill its role as the most useful independent review source available. During the early years as the Wine Advocate cemented that position, Parker did all the tasting.  Now, Parker relies on a wider network of regular contributors.

The publication navigates a love/hate relationship with buyers and sellers alike. His 90+ point scores sell wines quickly but make them hard to find and expensive, and his sub 90 point scores have the opposite effect. Score 89 and miss by 1 point and watch a possibly wonderful expression of place,  fruit, and winemaker go unnoticed.  Live and die by the sword. wineadvocate

Despite the long standing criticism around applying numerical scores to wines and Parker’s preference for ripe and highly extracted wine, his amazingly consistent palate does offer a steady benchmark for anyone to calibrate their personal preferences to. If you follow Parker and he says “minerals” or “grassy”, you get what he means and know pretty well whether you might like that wine or not and if Parker says “fat” or “chewy”, you also can picture your palate’s interpretation, and so on. This was never the case for other high profile wine review media like the Wine Spectator and others that rotate tasters, rely on panels, or change reviewers over varying periods of time.  You never really know if the grassy note in the June 2008 issue is the same grassy thing referenced in a review six months later.

In a recent post Tyler Coleman, aka Dr. Vino, suggests Parker is facing a real problem since certain Wine Advocate correspondents are in violation of Parker’s self imposed strict code of operating ethics. Coleman quotes Parker:

“It is imperative for a wine critic to pay his own way. Gratuitous hospitality in the form of airline tickets, hotel rooms, guest houses, etc., should never be accepted either abroad or in this country. While it is important to maintain a professional relationship with the trade, I believe the independent stance required of a consumer advocate, often not surprisingly, results in an adversarial relationship with the wine trade. It can be no other way. In order to pursue independence effectively, it is imperative to keep one’s distance from the trade. While this attitude may be interpreted as aloofness, such independence guarantees hard-hitting, candid, and uninfluenced commentary.”

Coleman stumbled upon some conversation on Mark Squires’ bulletin board which had implications of impropriety. Squires and Jay Miller are part of a growing number of reviewers that Parker brought into the Wine Advocate orbit as correspondents for specific regions. Coleman points to violations by both including free travel and meals with the trade. Clearly a violation, but really not the largest problem for the Wine Advocate as I see it.

I guess it’s practical to bring on correspondents with the wide geography covered and multitude of wines reviewed. But after more than 20 years of  calibrating my palate to Parker’s words, I can’t react when another Wine Advocate correspondent describes a wine. Why? Because I just don’t know what they mean when they say “grassy”. Parker has abandoned the Wine Advocate’s “one palate” approach over the years, and it’s an even bigger challenge to the Wine Advocate’s consistent word on wine that many still trust the most….certainly bigger than a trip or a meal with friends in the trade.

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  • danielrmccarthy

    That’s a real puzzle in building out an aesthetic brand. The artistry in bringing a point of view and a consistent reference point to any work of art requires constant immersion. But every one has limitation of time and space.

    I think back to the artist studios of the renaissance, where the master would train apprentices and then assign them a specific part of the canvas and then come and check their work.

    How does an artist of a wine palate mimic that discipline? If you knew that there was an intense level of training and oversight, you’d have more confidence in the other opinions, I’d think.

  • adamjapko

    That’s a really good point and with the scope of wine producing regions, apprenticeships are required to remain comprehensive. On one hand, you can ask whether comprehensive coverage is critical enough to abandon the purity of a single perspective and beacon. On the other hand, as you point out, a statement of training or guidelines for translating sensory experience into words would be helpful. If Parker was tasting the same wines his correspondents were and gave the final nod, I guess I would have as little issue as with the renaissance painter who performed final checks before the work was made public. Maybe Parker can restore some confidence in a system he is comfortable with.

  • Thomas Matthews

    At Wine Spectator, many tasting beats have been covered by the same editor for decades: James Suckling in Bordeaux, for example, or James Laube in California. When we do give a beat to a new taster, there is an extensive transition period where both editors work through the wines together to calibrate their palates. And before we allow a new taster to assume any beat, there is an apprentice period of several years of wide-ranging tastings and extensive testing. I think the Renaissance art studios is a fine corollary to our practice.

    For a good introduction to our methodology, please watch our free video, “Inside the Tasting Department.”
    http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Free/Video/0,4258,353549858_1527680295_1374431132,00.html

    Of course, in the end, each taster is responsible for his or her regions (signing reviews with their initials), and ultimately has to earn readers’ trust on their own.

    Thomas Matthews
    Executive editor
    Wine Spectator

  • adamjapko

    Thomas, thanks for the excellent update and video link on the tasting beat approach at the Wine Spectator. Suckling and Laube are credible guys with consistency on their side. I have been a subscriber to both the Spectator and Advocate since the 80′s, and greatly respect the depth of new release coverage and, mostly, industry news and personality presentation. Along with my regular tasting group, I cut my teeth more than twenty years ago learning Parker’s language, as one taster, as a benchmark in shaping my personal preferences without converting to his. My point in the “One Robert Parker” post is that things were more straightforward when every review was the result of one palate and one author (Parker); year in and year out.

    I remember noting the growing list of new correspondents at the WS and Advocate over the years as they joined, and each time recognized that I would need to work harder at developing a reliable interpretation of any one review. Your point about Wine Spectator staff palate calibration is quite interesting, and recalliing the shaping of our tasting group’s palate over time, it absolutely works. Multiple correspondents appear to be practical and necessary for comprehensive coverage considering the global reach of the industry, so it appears wine enthusiasts will just need to work a little harder and root for staff calibration and extended tenure in the editorial staff ranks of leading wine review media.

    Adam Japko
    WineZag

  • GregT

    Parker was faced with two choices – limit coverage or add more people. In the early 1980s there were maybe 6 wineries in Virginia; today there are over 125. That’s Virginia of all places. Washington State has somewhere between 520 and 550 wineries today, against a fraction of that several years ago. California has even more. Spain has simply exploded – there were many growers for centuries, but they weren’t exporting and many sold their product to co-ops whereas today they make their own wine.

    So Parker could have continued to cover Bordeaux, the Rhone, Napa and Sonoma and maybe all of California, and one or two other areas he knows and loves. But his workload can’t possibly allow him to cover all regions any more. So if he wanted to cover more regions, he needed to bring in additional help.

    TMs method of introducing a new critic isn’t bad. Another way is to fold in other existing critics with expertise in specific areas. The Wine Advocate did that by bringing in Galloni for Italy and Schildineckt for Germany and white wine regions. Those people may not have the same palate as Parker, but they’ve established their own palates and reputations. In some new and emerging regions, there are no widely recognized experts, so you don’t have that option. I believe that he brought in the other critics because he felt that their palates were fairly aligned with his, and that’s not a bad plan either, if one wishes to maintain a consistent approach. He was faced with a tough choice and there were pitfall with any approach he took.

    Because WS was subdivided much earlier, it seems more accepted, but as an experiment, it would be interesting to have the critics at both publications all rate a number of the same wines and then to compare the scores. Ideally, they’d be pretty tightly clustered for every wine and then you’d know what “grassy” meant. If they weren’t consistently clustered, you simply need to understand the individual critic. I doubt that many people have the time or inclination to do that.

  • Thomas Matthews

    Should a publication be consistent regardless of who reviews the wines, or should a critic be consistent, regardless of anyone else’s views? Neither position is entirely satisfactory. I would say we at Wine Spectator have a general “house style,” shorthanded as preferring ripe fruit, balance, concentration, typicity and lack of flaws. Yet the editors often taste together in blind flights, and usually there is some variation among scores. So ultimately readers have to trust the individual tasters, or at least trust the publication to choose tasters who are well-qualified for their beats.

    Thomas Matthews
    Executive editor
    Wine Spectator

  • http://www.weinakademie-berlin.de Michael Pleitgen

    Dear Thomas,

    very interesting point: “house style”. I worked with one of big importers and distributers in Germany. When you taste for years with the same peers, even blind, you agree very quickly on a wine. So from time time you have to take some time off or taste with a different group and see wether you stand their arguments. For a buyer it’s relatively easy to see wether he’s right: he follows the sales of his products.

    Michael Pleitgen

    Weinakademie Berlin, Germany