Enzo - it’s not that it’s such a hard slog in and of itself, but that it converts something I love to do as recreation into work. I like drinking good wine with good food and, preferably, friends. I’d hate to convert it to a series of thousands of sips and notes. I imagine movie buffs feel the same way about movie critics - yes, you get to see movies for free but you HAVE to and you have to watch Pluto Nash as well as Moon. But, yeah, in a world with high unemployment, people losing their homes, and lots of people working hard jobs for little pay, I’m not weeping over RP or any wine critic’s tough life.
This is a new personal “best”, I think.
A lot of people get into the wine business–such as via retail or through wineries–and what was once fun and recreation can become somewhat of a grind. A long time ago, I worked part-time in a wine retail store, and I could see how working full-time selling wine for several years could get old very quickly. I also don’t feel bad for RP–I assume he finds enough enjoyment and monetary reward in it to continue to do it. But to be a professional wine critic–to have to taste hundreds of wines a month and take comprehensive notes on them–would definitely take a lot of fun out of it (at least for me).
Bruce
Definitely looks busy, but also looks like time management and delegation aren’t his strong suit. At his age, he could be working with someone else to take on some of the burden desrcibed here and become the “editor in chief” of twa. Instead, you have someone running around the world maintaining a schedule someone 20 years younger would nearly drop dead from, and people who know wine are supposed to take these “reviews” seriously?
It’s like taking an exam. You sit there, think and concentrate. It’s not fun. You have have to concentrate and for me I have to keep bringing
myself back to focus as elements in the wine trigger memories of wines, flavor descriptors–I am easily distracted perhaps. It’s like sitting for an exam and each wine is a multipart question.
“Hard, exhausting, boring, hectic. Are you all serious? Have any of you ever had to really ever work in your life? I can think of a lot of folks who would give their eye teeth for a “work week” like the one described. I’d be one of them.”
In 20 years of attending VinItaly where we do pretty much the same thing, only ONE “civilian” has ever made it past lunch the 1st day with us. They soon realize that it IS work and say, “You know, you guys are working and I can’t keep up so I’m just going to wander around and see what looks interesting…”
Sure, but it beats coal-mining.
Of course it beats coal mining but it is NOT a vacation or a “that’s not really working” sort of thing.
Won’t Squires sue you, Tom, for posting such a long excerpt here, and Todd too?
I’m sure I could keep up with you (fly me over and we’ll see!) but I wouldn’t want to. Neither you nor the other pros are superhuman, you just do it because you need/want to. You plow through whereas the civilians don’t have to - so once they see it’s work and not fun, they bail because they can whereas you can’t. Nor can critics who need to do a report on a region.
I love my job and work very hard at it, thank you very much! (except while checking WB during the day…). I’ve also had two highly physically-demanding construction-related jobs in my lifetime; RP has taken “physically-demanding” to a new level here.
And drinking wine, or watching a movie, is something I do to relax. That’s really the whole point of drinking wine (to me). He has made something designed to be relaxing into an incredible grind.
But Roberto, you have to admit, that the frequent parties, bacchanals and orgies that we get invited to, being in the wine trade, does somewhat offset the other hardships that we endure?
Yes, Peter, the Prosecco, Prosciutto & Gelato Orgy thrown by Bacchus Imports the last night of VinItaly 2009 WAS a nice party…
I just did a solid week of tastings in Vienna for the ÖGZ, the Austrian Gastronomy Magazine.
on this occasion we tasted 320 wines in five days, starting off usually with six to ten desserts,
then palate cleansers
followed by varietally-specific flights of a dozen reds at a time.
the state of my palate—and I’m not a heroic winetaster, and probably smoked too much Rattray’s Red Rapparee and drank too much Laphroaig in my 20s to have the most acute tastebuds—
was so much better even toward the end of the day than it was with the same group tasting the same sort of wines a year earlier, where we did toward 100 wines per day…
Anthony,
He references the “large peer-group tastings”. As I understand the way things are done in Calif (and presumably in the Rhone and other regions),
he blows into a region and somebody/somebodies have been laboring mightly behind the scenes to organize these large peer-group tastings.
There will be somebody who will gather all the bottles for Parker to try, from various wineries (what I’d like to know is how those wineries are vetted) that have
been solicited, bring them all to one central venue (like a hotel conference room), bag them, number them, check for corked wines, open them up, get them at the
right temperature, make sure the proper glassware is available…all that nitty-gritty stuff that normal folk have to do to taste wines. He then blows into the room,
tastes thru several hundred wines, and then sweeps out the door,
presumably after the wines are identified. I suspect he’ll sometimes go back & retaste some who received low marks, but that he knows are better than the scores they received.
For those peer-group tastings, there’s an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes work that he doesn’t have to waste his time on. He’s probably one of the few wine critics
in the world who can command that kind of labor. And then he’ll go on to taste at the “reference point properties”.
Tom
Maybe, but I gave up this life to go to law school. Not many folks understand it at first, but traveling around out of a single suitcase for several weeks at a time “working” 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week (without the nice restaurant breaks Bob gets), gets old after a while. Granted, I had experiences during this period that are among the best of my life, but generally I enjoy wine more as an avocation than as a vocation.
Not for Bob. He doesn’t taste blind. ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
I’ve already warned James Suckling what he can anticipate for next week regarding this subject
![[training.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/d0f39866e5714408d7091b0bd2d7bb764d7bb973.gif "[training.gif]"){kind=small}
That’s a reasonable schedule.
Gotta hand it to RP. He’s done some serious training to get to that level, I’d have palate overload