Wine man's bluff

Robert Parker is seen by some as a saviour of the wine trade. Others claim his ability to affect the price of a wine has led winemakers to just create wines that suit his palate. Tom Bruce- Gardyne attempts to unpick the truth about the ultimate tastemaker

As Finnish composer Jean Sibelius famously declared, “No statue has ever been put up to a critic”. But then, there has never been a critic quite like wine writer Robert Parker. Certainly, no one before has had anything like the global impact Parker has on wine. His pronouncements and percentage scores cause the market to effectively dance to his tune. Because a top rating can be worth as much as £5m to a producer, some argue that many wines have been “Parkerised”—designed to appeal to his tastes, which favour full-bodied, ripe-fruit wines with a high alcohol content.
The 100-point scoring system is the key to understanding Parker’s power, (see panel), although he stresses the importance of his tasting notes and on his website declares “there can never be any substitute for your own palate”. But the chances are, when a Texan tycoon boasts of a cellar full of “95 Bordeaux” he’s talking Parker points, not vintage.

Parker has made the daunting world of fine wine more accessible, particularly Bordeaux, with its wilful complexity and ossified class structure. Rich Americans began buying into the sector in the 1980s and faced a serious problem, as Colin Gent of fine wine trader, Europvin, explains: “They found the subject complicated and didn’t have time to find out about it. They wanted the best, but didn’t know which wines were the best.” Naïve and wealthy, the US was a market made in heaven for Bordeaux’s Grands Crus. Parker’s arrival was timely indeed.

Born in 1947, Robert Parker Jr has always lived in Maryland in a town he describes as “one step from the farm”. Raised on fizzy drinks, his first experience of wine made him throw up. But after a trip to France in 1967 he became hooked and has been touring the wine regions ever since. In 1978, he launched a newsletter, The Wine Advocate, which has never taken advertising and now has over 40,000 subscribers worldwide. In 1984 he left his job as a lawyer to write about wine full time. His ambition for The Wine Advocate was to steer an easy path through the wine maze, rating wines out of 100. He later claimed the scoring system was a reaction to “the vagueness of British wine writing” which he regarded as too nebulous.

It wasn’t just the woolly prose that Parker wanted to challenge, it was deference to pedigree. “What I’ve brought is a democratic view,” he explains. “I don’t care that your family goes back to pre-Revolution and you’ve got more wealth than I could imagine. If this wine’s no good, I’m gonna say so.” The Washington Post claimed that “Parker sees himself as a Lone Ranger figure, riding through a hail of gobbledygook fired at consumers”.

Parker has often styled himself as a people’s champion and once declared that “until 1978 most wine critics were essentially on the take”. And it was partly true; some were plugging wines they sold on the side.

By the same token, Parker also has his critics. British Burgundy specialist Anthony Hanson says: “He sells himself as a critic, but I see him as a business-man, selling subscriptions to The Wine Advocate.”
It’s typical for views on Parker to be polarised. Fans, or so-called “Bob-huggers”, cite his divine tasting ability, encyclopaedic memory and all round brilliance. Others attack him as a monster bent on promoting only international, pumped-up wines lacking in local flavour or “terroir”. In the film Mondovino, a heart-felt polemic against globalisation in wine, Parker is pictured smiling beside a Burger King.
“He has fantastic stamina and memory,” says the English wine writer Steven Spurrier. “You only have to read him on the Rhône to feel his passion. He is physically large and his natural inclination is to like big wines.” But Parker can be remarkably thin-skinned and vindictive. When it was put to him that the English prefer their wines older and more elegant, he was outraged. “That’s code for vulgar American, not educated at Oxford. It’s like saying I only find Pamela Anderson attractive.”

In some ways Parker can be seen as a tragic figure, condemned to taste over 10,000 wines a year, often alone. The Observer columnist Tim Atkin claims that assessing just the wine, ignoring its origins and maker, only tells half the story. While broadly pro-Parker, he says “the irony is that the consumer champion has ended up being used to charge higher prices.”

This chimes with the winemaker Jean-Christophe Mau’s view that “Mr Parker is very, very good for Bordeaux”. Whisper it quietly, but Sibelius may yet be proved wrong.

“I don’t care that your family goes back to pre-Revolution times. If this wine’s no good I’m gonna say so”

The Parker process
As each wine enters Robert Parker’s mouth to be judged, the moment of truth is brutally short. Each wine—in an anonymous glass—is picked up, swirled, sniffed, chewed and spat out. Simultaneously it is measured against his vast memory that includes previous vintages and the wine’s peer group. Then a score is awarded. Every wine starts with 50 points. Colour and appearance add up to five more, 15 more are available for aroma and bouquet, while the flavour and finish add up to 20 more. The final 10 are awarded for overall quality and potential for improvement. Wines with over 90 points are outstanding, those over 96 truly extraordinary.