Our card is more Rock than Rap…
Yeah, we all get older and wiser, but it’s also true that Parker wasn’t nearly the jerk 7 years ago that he is now. Forgive our younger selves!
No more smoking the weed after midnight Eric! it dulls the senses!! 
perhaps, but from that 2002 thread, you can see the seed has been planted.
Yes, assuming memory serves (a daring assumption at this point in my life) this was an outgrowth of the whole 1993 vintage downgrade in Burgundy and the Parker Knownothingitis thread that Rovani started.
At one point it was stated that Tanzer viewed 1993 much more favorably than the Wine Advocate and this was Mr. Parker’s rebuttal. Of course as Alan notes that didn’t explain the low vintage rating.
The eventual explanation that came out is that they believed that 1993 was a variable vintage and so-so producers made very bad wines so anyone relying on a vintage chart would have a good chance of ordering a bad wine from 1993 if they thought it was a good overall vintage. They would only give a high rating to a vintage where mediocre producers made good wine rather than a vintage where good producers made great wine.
I’m somewhat nostalgic for that thread since it was the one that first drew me onto the Squires board when someone on Robin’s board posted about the 1993 downgrade and I went WTF? It’s also the thread that introduced me to the wonders of 1993 white Burgundy which I started looking into after seeing Stuart and Yixin’s raves.
You were hanging with Zuccs back then, too?
Sounds like a perfectly plausible explanation to me, if the purpose of a single number as a vintage grade is to help people make educated guesses when they are presented with unfamiliar choices [on restaurant lists, or when travelling].
Parker’s problem was that he didn’t move more aggressively onto devices like the Palm and then the Blackberry - if he had realized [and capitalized on] the potential held by “mobile” information, then today he’d be orders of magnitude more wealthy than he is [because his customers wouldn’t have been hamstrung by a single number as a vintage guide, but instead would have had ALL of the numbers at their fingertips].
But at this point, mobile information has become so commoditized [cf Parker’s new competition from Cellar Tracker] that that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has been lost forever.
Heck, any of Parker or Tanzer or Shanken could have been Cellar Tracker, if only they’d had a little foresight.
But that’s true of all the old dinosaur media.
That thread rates a 97+ on the sycophancy scale, with a slightly disturbing, distinctly barnyard note in the nose.
As we all may or may not remember, Parker panned the 1993 vintage in the fall of 1993, when he was there reviewing the 1992s. He said the vintage was going to be shit because of the weather in September.
How do you remember shit that happened before you were even born?
Don’t ask questions.
Speaking of epic vintages, what did he say about the 1992 whites?
One of the best wines I’ve ever had in my life was a negociant white from 1992 [that no one has ever even heard of].
Mel - That is a gorgeous, very evocative photo!
He said Aubert is better.
Seriously, he called it a “top flight year” and then added that “they will have to be drunk young as they are ripe, alcoholic, rich, and low in acidity.”
Looks like he nailed another one. 
Yes, though I have no idea how accurate it is as I tend to buy Burgundy based on the mantra of producer, producer, producer/vineyard. All the producers that I buy made some of their best wines in 1993. So from my experience (and that of most people who were buying Burgundy selectively as opposed to at random) of course the vintage rating made no sense. Shows the usefulness of vintage ratings 
However one tries to explain/rationalize the vintage rating, it’s still bizarre given the quality at the top end. Besides, how hard should we work to sympathize with a publication that raved about 97 red Burgundies?
To me the debate over the rating of the 93 vintage is a lot less interesting than the fawning posts in that thread!