PUNCH: Parker & Parkerization of Wines

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

To be clear, my comment about Parker’s reaction to critics wasn’t really about his dealings on internet boards - that’s a very small part of the wine world that’s relevant to us, but not to most other people.

I also don’t think anyone is misreading the article. Those who are criticizing it do so because it’s both simplistic and unoriginal and they don’t agree with its conclusions. More than enough time has passed to be able to consider Parker with a lot more nuance. For someone about whom a book called “The Emperor of Wine” has already been written, a short article like this feels lazy.

One of the paradoxes that the article (quite a few of Parker’s critics) don’t address is that if all he did was make America drink more of what they already wanted, he would never have been as powerful as he was. Parker set agendas and palates more than people want to give him credit (and blame) for. The argument the article makes is, to a large extent, tautological.

If you can disagree with the argument, it’s not tautological. It means that the article was making a point. Yes, it was short. We’re talking about Punch magazine. As for people misreading the article, look up at the beginning of the thread for how many took it as the usual Parker bashing. And now that enough have seen that it was not, how many dispute its position that Parker was not responsible for Parkerization. As I said, I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. I am coming to think and article should be written about why so many people care about what the answer is so many years after the question has become irrelevant.

[Greg_K]

To be clear, my comment about Parker’s reaction to critics wasn’t really about his dealings on internet boards - that’s a very small part of the wine world that’s relevant to us, but not to most other people.

I also don’t think anyone is misreading the article. Those who are criticizing it do so because it’s both simplistic and unoriginal and they don’t agree with its conclusions. More than enough time has passed to be able to consider Parker with a lot more nuance. For someone about whom a book called “The Emperor of Wine” has already been written, a short article like this feels lazy.

One of the paradoxes that the article (quite a few of Parker’s critics) don’t address is that if all he did was make America drink more of what they already wanted, he would never have been as powerful as he was. Parker set agendas and palates more than people want to give him credit (and blame) for. The argument the article makes is, to a large extent, tautological.

If you can disagree with the argument, it’s not tautological. It means that the article was making a point. Yes, it was short. We’re talking about Punch magazine. As for people misreading the article, look up at the beginning of the thread for how many took it as the usual Parker bashing. And now that enough have seen that it was not, how many dispute its position that Parker was not responsible for Parkerization. As I said, I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. I am coming to think and article should be written about why so many people care about what the answer is so many years after the question has become irrelevant.

Once can certainly disagree with tautological arguments. The shortness of the article isn’t the issue. Parker was certainly partially responsible for Parkerization.

People care about it because he exuded a massive influence on wine, and his influence remains relevant to this day in quite a few forms - TWA is still extant, his disciples abound both in criticism (LPB) and winemaking (Rolland) and how the wines he praised when he was at his apogee of power age and perform is relevant because they’re being opened. Of course he’s still relevant.
This is, of course, beside the point that just because someone is not immediately relevant to the present moment makes them irrelevant or uninteresting of comment - that’s basically dismissing the entire field of history in one sentence.

[btyson]

As one of the (I believe very few) members under 30, an article like this helps me recontextualize what I know about parker and his impact vs. being a punchline about my family’s taste in wine. I would assume most, if not everyone on this board first experienced ‘fine wine’ through his view of what that meant, he just provided a very accessible way of understanding it which was in line with people’s tastes and got them excited about it in the same way he was.

I’m not sure his ascent/impact would have been so rapid if he’d chosen to write about wines that were less in line with the collective American palate, but his use of the points system seems to be his biggest legacy and one that extends to almost all types of criticism, not just wine. To my understanding, the quality and variety of wine has also increased dramatically since he started writing, as knowledge and tools have gotten cheaper and more accessible to winemakers, so he wouldn’t have been able to highlight some boutique natty producer in the same way we can now, part of his pov has to be accounted for what was available to him.

As noted, this biggest issue to me is that his taste didn’t evolve and was excessively pandered to by commercial winemakers who wanted a high score to move units, and he couldn’t spot that while seemingly everyone else could.

TLDR; i’m young and articles like this are helpful to me to better understand the wine industry and how we got here.

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

A tautology is a proposition such as “Bachelors are never-married men.” They are what Kant calls synthetically true, or true by definition. Other philosophers call them trivially true. Whatever kind of true they are, they are true. I suppose you could disagree with a claim that Bachelors are never married men, but it would be hard to know what you are thinking.

The claim that Parker was certainly partially responsible for Parkerization, by contrast, begs the question. This does not mean it raises some other question. It means it assumes an answer that is the point of the dispute. It is possible to disagree with that. I don’t know that I do, but I am certainly less certain than you are.

Being irrelevant to the present moment was, of course, my point. He will be an important part of any history of wine criticism, should such an insignificant topic ever have a history of it written. A prominent historian did write a very interesting history of the wine trade in England, so one can hope. But the present moment and not the writing of history is where we are on this board. I expect that the only people who care about Parker any more have axes to grind one way or another. On the other hand, as a friend of mine interviewing a perspective graduate student who suspected that his department (known for literary theorists) had an axe to grind, answered, “Well, either you have an axe to grind, or you don’t have an axe.” I’m afraid, when it comes to this topic, I am lacking in axes.

[Peter_Chiu]

I see him at a local restaurant. I don’t go there very often, probably a handful of times a year, but he has been there every time I’ve gone. He looks to be in decent health for a guy his age. He’s obviously sitting down, so I don’t know if he moves well. But he’s usually there with one or two other couples and they are eating and drinking wine, so he’s still out and about and seems fine.

Thanks…sorta what I was interested in hearing.
Tom

• one. Merci…

[Jeff_Leve]

I don’t find the article formulaic as William does. And I think it has much of the necessary nuance, except maybe it fails to mention that palate changes with age (and probably even weight), and that outlier wines will tend to stand out in marathon tastings more than balanced ones.

Well, without wishing to get drawn down a rabbit hole, I think it fails to contextualize RP’s work; fails to understand the importance of the way he disrupted traditional hierarchies above all in the 1980s (e.g. writing about Selosse lavishly in 1985, championing “country wines” such as Cornas or Madiran as the equals of many “noble” appellations, criticizing some of the most celebrated crus classé of Bordeaux as underperforming); fails to actually get into how wine criticism functions and how it affects the outcomes of tastings (i.e. the difference between big mass tastings vs. visiting producers); and doesn’t really interrogate the notion of “Parkerization” (it would be interesting to get into the role of importers, consultants, other journalists etc etc here). This isn’t me being some sort of ex-cathedra defender of the faith, far from it, I simply tend to think that if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation, you should remain silent. My reflection was, much along the lines of the comment that the historian Geoffrey Elton once made at the end of a seminar presentation, “if you thought it was worth doing, why did you do it so badly?”

Well said. But there was more to it than that. Bob was fearless in his choices. He could take a wine that nobody knew and score it through the roof. It was the wine, not the history that mattered.

He could also slam a famous wine, with no thought to its history. It was always the wine in his glass that mattered.

The entire Bordeaux campaign was set on his shoulders. The vintage was priced up or down based on his scores, and his scores only. Once he pressed send, the weight of billions of dollars of wine rested on his shoulders.

Something else Bob did, he made you either want to buy and taste, or pass on a wine based on his prose. He took wine tasting and moved it from lists of adjectives to a hedonistic experience.

While Bob takes hits for liking powerful ripe wines, on this board it’s often lost that he also adored elegant, fresh wines as well. He was not hung up on one style. He liked wines he thought were good in a diverse array of styles.

He deserves credit for all that and more.

[Greg_K]

A tautology is a proposition such as “Bachelors are never-married men.” They are what Kant calls synthetically true, or true by definition. Other philosophers call them trivially true. Whatever kind of true they are, they are true. I suppose you could disagree with a claim that Bachelors are never married men, but it would be hard to know what you are thinking.

A tautological argument is one that assumes its conclusion (whether the conclusion is true or not), which the author did here. The author’s view is that Parker did nothing more than reflect the American palate, so by definition he could not have been responsible for “Parkerization” because he was just a reflection of the American wine drinking id. I disagree with the author’s argument because I disagree with his assumption.

The claim that Parker was certainly partially responsible for Parkerization, by contrast, begs the question. This does not mean it raises some other question. It means it assumes an answer that is the point of the dispute. It is possible to disagree with that. I don’t know that I do, but I am certainly less certain than you are.

No, it doesn’t beg the question. Begging the question is basically the same as a tautological argument, which would be the case here if I assumed Parker was partially responsible for Parkerization. You can argue I’ve not presented evidence, but I’ve made no such assumption.

Being irrelevant to the present moment was, of course, my point. He will be an important part of any history of wine criticism, should such an insignificant topic ever have a history of it written. A prominent historian did write a very interesting history of the wine trade in England, so one can hope. But the present moment and not the writing of history is where we are on this board. I expect that the only people who care about Parker any more have axes to grind one way or another. On the other hand, as a friend of mine interviewing a perspective graduate student who suspected that his department (known for literary theorists) had an axe to grind, answered, “Well, either you have an axe to grind, or you don’t have an axe.” I’m afraid, when it comes to this topic, I am lacking in axes.

1. It’s not irrelevant to the present moment. If something was irrelevant to the present moment it wouldn’t have generated the article or a subsequent discussion.
2. Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s no longer relevant. It’s quite clear that Parker’s influence remains meaningful to this day. There is plenty of wine criticism that is no longer relevant - we’re not much concerned with Pliny the Elder’s thoughts on Falernian and Chian vintages. Parker isn’t quite so remote.
3. This board spends lots of time on the historical aspects of wine.
4. I have absolutely no axes to grind with Parker and someone just posted about how the article and the discussion are meaningful to them today. If you want to say you find this discussion uninteresting, that’s fine! That does not make it uninteresting.

[John_Glas]

I think people are slightly misreading the article, which really says that Parker’s power was caused by the fact that the world was ready for what he was advocating and not that it changed because of him. I’m not sure why Baby Boomers are called out for having American tastes. Plenty more than that generation like Coke and sugar. And the last paragraph suggests that lemming behavior will always be with us, so that now natural wine is the new fad. I don’t know that I agree with any of these things, but it is an interesting and different take.

I’ve always thought that. People around here act like Parker made people like ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines. But he was only successful because he was correct that’s what a large portion of wine drinkers ended up liking better.

Had Parker come along and given high scores to thin greeny herbal wines, those wouldn’t have become what everyone made and bought – Parker just would never have become someone any of us heard of.

He was a reflection of what the public likes, not the cause of them liking it.

The more that drink the ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines the better for me. I will just camp out in Walla Walla for a while where the wines are none of that and much cheaper.

[Guillermo_M]

I don’t find the article formulaic as William does. And I think it has much of the necessary nuance, except maybe it fails to mention that palate changes with age (and probably even weight), and that outlier wines will tend to stand out in marathon tastings more than balanced ones.

Well, without wishing to get drawn down a rabbit hole, I think it fails to contextualize RP’s work; fails to understand the importance of the way he disrupted traditional hierarchies above all in the 1980s (e.g. writing about Selosse lavishly in 1985, championing “country wines” such as Cornas or Madiran as the equals of many “noble” appellations, criticizing some of the most celebrated crus classé of Bordeaux as underperforming); fails to actually get into how wine criticism functions and how it affects the outcomes of tastings (i.e. the difference between big mass tastings vs. visiting producers); and doesn’t really interrogate the notion of “Parkerization” (it would be interesting to get into the role of importers, consultants, other journalists etc etc here). This isn’t me being some sort of ex-cathedra defender of the faith, far from it, I simply tend to think that if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation, you should remain silent. My reflection was, much along the lines of the comment that the historian Geoffrey Elton once made at the end of a seminar presentation, “if you thought it was worth doing, why did you do it so badly?”

Well said. But there was more to it than that. Bob was fearless in his choices. He could take a wine that nobody knew and score it through the roof. It was the wine, not the history that mattered.

He could also slam a famous wine, with no thought to its history. It was always the wine in his glass that mattered.

The entire Bordeaux campaign was set on his shoulders. The vintage was priced up or down based on his scores, and his scores only. Once he pressed send, the weight of billions of dollars of wine rested on his shoulders.

Something else Bob did, he made you either want to buy and taste, or pass on a wine based on his prose. He took wine tasting and moved it from lists of adjectives to a hedonistic experience.

While Bob takes hits for liking powerful ripe wines, on this board it’s often lost that he also adored elegant, fresh wines as well. He was not hung up on one style. He liked wines he thought were good in a diverse array of styles.

He deserves credit for all that and more.

Be that as it may, the article is not formulaic and it has enough nuance that Bennett, the only Gen Z (or borderline Gen Z) non-ITB person who has shared his opinion, found it illuminating. He now sees Parker as something more nuanced than “a punchline about [his] family’s taste in wine.” And that was the point I was explicitly making and which Jonathan has been at pains to underscore. I would think both William and you would appreciate that.

As to the discussion on tautology and relevance. Greg, I think Jonathan is claiming that the chicken-and-egg argument (whether Parker caused Parkerization or whether it found him) is what’s irrelevant, not the entire article, which as you point out and as Jonathan has agreed, is, in fact, relevant.

[Chris_Seiber]

I think people are slightly misreading the article, which really says that Parker’s power was caused by the fact that the world was ready for what he was advocating and not that it changed because of him. I’m not sure why Baby Boomers are called out for having American tastes. Plenty more than that generation like Coke and sugar. And the last paragraph suggests that lemming behavior will always be with us, so that now natural wine is the new fad. I don’t know that I agree with any of these things, but it is an interesting and different take.

I’ve always thought that. People around here act like Parker made people like ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines. But he was only successful because he was correct that’s what a large portion of wine drinkers ended up liking better.

Had Parker come along and given high scores to thin greeny herbal wines, those wouldn’t have become what everyone made and bought – Parker just would never have become someone any of us heard of.

He was a reflection of what the public likes, not the cause of them liking it.

The more that drink the ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines the better for me. I will just camp out in Walla Walla for a while where the wines are none of that and much cheaper.

I feel like Parker styled wines are quite prevalent in Washington. Am I wrong?

[John_Glas]

I’ve always thought that. People around here act like Parker made people like ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines. But he was only successful because he was correct that’s what a large portion of wine drinkers ended up liking better.

Had Parker come along and given high scores to thin greeny herbal wines, those wouldn’t have become what everyone made and bought – Parker just would never have become someone any of us heard of.

He was a reflection of what the public likes, not the cause of them liking it.

The more that drink the ripe, clean, oaky, modern wines the better for me. I will just camp out in Walla Walla for a while where the wines are none of that and much cheaper.

I feel like Parker styled wines are quite prevalent in Washington. Am I wrong?

Yes you are. I don’t like Quilceda Creek at all but did 15 years ago and of course is the most Parker Styled wine in the state. Leonetti (which I like) maybe has some of the characteristics but so many wineries that don’t: Cayuse, Balboa, Sleight of Hand, Dusted Valley, Amavi, Elephant Seven, Mason Bleue, Saviah, The Walls and that is just Walla Walla.

[Jonathan_Loesberg]

A tautology is a proposition such as “Bachelors are never-married men.” They are what Kant calls synthetically true, or true by definition. Other philosophers call them trivially true. Whatever kind of true they are, they are true. I suppose you could disagree with a claim that Bachelors are never married men, but it would be hard to know what you are thinking.

A tautological argument is one that assumes its conclusion (whether the conclusion is true or not), which the author did here. The author’s view is that Parker did nothing more than reflect the American palate, so by definition he could not have been responsible for “Parkerization” because he was just a reflection of the American wine drinking id. I disagree with the author’s argument because I disagree with his assumption.

The claim that Parker was certainly partially responsible for Parkerization, by contrast, begs the question. This does not mean it raises some other question. It means it assumes an answer that is the point of the dispute. It is possible to disagree with that. I don’t know that I do, but I am certainly less certain than you are.

No, it doesn’t beg the question. Begging the question is basically the same as a tautological argument, which would be the case here if I assumed Parker was partially responsible for Parkerization. You can argue I’ve not presented evidence, but I’ve made no such assumption.

Being irrelevant to the present moment was, of course, my point. He will be an important part of any history of wine criticism, should such an insignificant topic ever have a history of it written. A prominent historian did write a very interesting history of the wine trade in England, so one can hope. But the present moment and not the writing of history is where we are on this board. I expect that the only people who care about Parker any more have axes to grind one way or another. On the other hand, as a friend of mine interviewing a perspective graduate student who suspected that his department (known for literary theorists) had an axe to grind, answered, “Well, either you have an axe to grind, or you don’t have an axe.” I’m afraid, when it comes to this topic, I am lacking in axes.

1. It’s not irrelevant to the present moment. If something was irrelevant to the present moment it wouldn’t have generated the article or a subsequent discussion.
2. Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s no longer relevant. It’s quite clear that Parker’s influence remains meaningful to this day. There is plenty of wine criticism that is no longer relevant - we’re not much concerned with Pliny the Elder’s thoughts on Falernian and Chian vintages. Parker isn’t quite so remote.
3. This board spends lots of time on the historical aspects of wine.
4. I have absolutely no axes to grind with Parker and someone just posted about how the article and the discussion are meaningful to them today. If you want to say you find this discussion uninteresting, that’s fine! That does not make it uninteresting.

You need to look up tautology in the dictionary. In logic, it mean just what you deny it does. In looser speech it can mean a redundancy such as the phrase a general consensus. In neither case, is it easy to see what it would mean to disagree with it. I guess you mean the article begs the question. But if your one sentence assertion of certainty does not do that, it’s hard to see why the article’s more extended series of assertions, whose contravertibility it at least recognizes, does.

Parker hasn’t reviewed wine for some years. If a taste remains for wines that get called Parkerized, it isn’t because of his reviews. I guess the argument over whether he caused that taste can still be of intellectual interest to those who like to beat dead horses. God knows I am guilty enough of that at times.

As I tried to suggest, I believe it’s better to have an axe to grind than not to have an axe. Just not in this case, I guess, where it’s hard to get worked up enough over the conflict to actually pick up an axe and sharpen it. The only axe I have here is the defense of the article’s lapidary tone.

[Freelon_F_Hunter]

I feel like Parker styled wines are quite prevalent in Washington. Am I wrong?

IMHO Nope.

[GregT]

I don’t find the article formulaic as William does. And I think it has much of the necessary nuance, except maybe it fails to mention that palate changes with age (and probably even weight), and that outlier wines will tend to stand out in marathon tastings more than balanced ones.

Well, without wishing to get drawn down a rabbit hole, I think it fails to contextualize RP’s work; fails to understand the importance of the way he disrupted traditional hierarchies above all in the 1980s (e.g. writing about Selosse lavishly in 1985, championing “country wines” such as Cornas or Madiran as the equals of many “noble” appellations, criticizing some of the most celebrated crus classé of Bordeaux as underperforming); fails to actually get into how wine criticism functions and how it affects the outcomes of tastings (i.e. the difference between big mass tastings vs. visiting producers); and doesn’t really interrogate the notion of “Parkerization” (it would be interesting to get into the role of importers, consultants, other journalists etc etc here). This isn’t me being some sort of ex-cathedra defender of the faith, far from it, I simply tend to think that if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation, you should remain silent. My reflection was, much along the lines of the comment that the historian Geoffrey Elton once made at the end of a seminar presentation, “if you thought it was worth doing, why did you do it so badly?”

Well said. But there was more to it than that. Bob was fearless in his choices. He could take a wine that nobody knew and score it through the roof. It was the wine, not the history that mattered.

He could also slam a famous wine, with no thought to its history. It was always the wine in his glass that mattered.

The entire Bordeaux campaign was set on his shoulders. The vintage was priced up or down based on his scores, and his scores only. Once he pressed send, the weight of billions of dollars of wine rested on his shoulders.

Something else Bob did, he made you either want to buy and taste, or pass on a wine based on his prose. He took wine tasting and moved it from lists of adjectives to a hedonistic experience.

While Bob takes hits for liking powerful ripe wines, on this board it’s often lost that he also adored elegant, fresh wines as well. He was not hung up on one style. He liked wines he thought were good in a diverse array of styles.

He deserves credit for all that and more.

This is true. He wrote in what a more sophisticated writer would maybe consider dumbed down - “gobs of fruit” wasn’t a line a Brit would ever use. But he always let you know where he stood - he loved a wine or didn’t care for it at all. He was good in that respect.

And as John said, in his earlier days, he was a force for change.

But the really interesting story about him, and one I’ve never seen written, is the change in him. This particular piece could have been lifted from 2002 or some other year a few decades ago. However, the changes in him that others have alluded to, are very reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Early on, he would definitely slam a famous wine. But that was the early Bob. After he got medals from the French, how often did he slam a famous wine, especially from Bordeaux?

And he began to demonstrate a very thin skin. That affable down-home guy showed up less and less and when he would go to wine events, he was followed around by cameras and press. And he did questionable things. He knew nothing at all about Spain and he held a tasting of Garnacha in Rioja. WTF?? He did a tasting of Rodenstock wines where he knew they were fakes and pre-judged them. To what end? He hired his buddy to review wines he knew nothing about. He lashed out at critics in what could only have been drunken rambles - and he gave us the immortal AFWE. That Parker was not the same one who was running off his WA on a mimeograph machine.

I know a guy who used to sell him Barbaresco and Barolo in the 1970s. Nobody thinks of Parker drinking those wines. But those are also a far cry from SQN in the 2000s. Would he still like them or did he still like them when he was drinking Krankl wine? Who knows.

I wish him no ill and if he’s really showing up at a restaurant with friends every so often, that’s good news.

[Robert.A.Jr]

I don’t find the article formulaic as William does. And I think it has much of the necessary nuance, except maybe it fails to mention that palate changes with age (and probably even weight), and that outlier wines will tend to stand out in marathon tastings more than balanced ones.

Well, without wishing to get drawn down a rabbit hole, I think it fails to contextualize RP’s work; fails to understand the importance of the way he disrupted traditional hierarchies above all in the 1980s (e.g. writing about Selosse lavishly in 1985, championing “country wines” such as Cornas or Madiran as the equals of many “noble” appellations, criticizing some of the most celebrated crus classé of Bordeaux as underperforming); fails to actually get into how wine criticism functions and how it affects the outcomes of tastings (i.e. the difference between big mass tastings vs. visiting producers); and doesn’t really interrogate the notion of “Parkerization” (it would be interesting to get into the role of importers, consultants, other journalists etc etc here). This isn’t me being some sort of ex-cathedra defender of the faith, far from it, I simply tend to think that if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation, you should remain silent. My reflection was, much along the lines of the comment that the historian Geoffrey Elton once made at the end of a seminar presentation, “if you thought it was worth doing, why did you do it so badly?”

Really well said, and lots of truth there.

I sorta have a love-hate relationship with Uncle Bob, but there is no doubt he heavily influenced my early involvement in wine. I got more heavily into the wine scene in the early 1990s at a time when Bordeaux was pumping out some tremendous wines from really killer vintages. Bob was a huge champion of Bordeaux, but so was Wine Spectator at that time. Where Bob excelled, however, was on the “sleepers”. He introduced me to Meyney and Sociando Mallet. And Leoville Barton. These have been mainstays in my Bordeaux appreciation. He also introduced me to Rhone, through Clape and Beaucastel, and significantly, to Beaujolais. He also introduced me to Chateau Montus. Those were not mainstream wines back then. My love of Rhone and Beaujolais continues to this day. I bet over 50% of my cellar is made up Rhône and Beaujolais. And I like country wines, thinks Montus. Note, William introduced me to another country wine a couple years ago that I love, Richoux in Irancy. Great stuff. Nobody else writes about it really.

I broke up with Bob in the later 1990s, as his infatuation with so-called cult California wines and this more evolving style of higher-alcohol and higher-percentage new oak wines. I also dumped Wine Spectator, largely because of the clown, Suckling. I went naked from that point forward.

Fast forward to the mid-2000s, and I dabbled back into some recommendations by Bob, and they turned out to be epic failures. Those were St Emilion and 2007 Chateauneuf du Pape. Epic mistake. Bob’s palate was a mess by now.

Funny anecdote, this paralleled me joining eBob. I recall one of my very first posts was a tasting note on Chateau Belle-Vue, a quirky left bank with a healthy dollop of petit verdot. It’s a great QPR. The post sank to the bottom, nobody cared about this no-name winery that I seemed to really enjoy. About 3 days later, Bob posted a response commenting on how great of a QPR this wine is, how it was amazing nobody commented, and reminded the group that everyone was lamenting wine prices, while here is an affordable, quality Bordeaux. After that, the thread got some decent hits. He was right on this wine, it’s a solid wine.

No matter how you view him, hard not to acknowledge the immense contribution he made to the world of wine. Much of it good. Some of it not so good.

The good news is, he is gone. Time for us to chart our own course. Columns like this actually add very little value to me, but I can certainly understand the desire to reminisce and provide hind-sight commentary. I’d rather look forward.

[Jeff_Leve]

But there was more to it than that. Bob was fearless in his choices. He could take a wine that nobody knew and score it through the roof. It was the wine, not the history that mattered.

He could also slam a famous wine, with no thought to its history. It was always the wine in his glass that mattered.

The entire Bordeaux campaign was set on his shoulders. The vintage was priced up or down based on his scores, and his scores only. Once he pressed send, the weight of billions of dollars of wine rested on his shoulders.

Something else Bob did, he made you either want to buy and taste, or pass on a wine based on his prose. He took wine tasting and moved it from lists of adjectives to a hedonistic experience.

While Bob takes hits for liking powerful ripe wines, on this board it’s often lost that he also adored elegant, fresh wines as well. He was not hung up on one style. He liked wines he thought were good in a diverse array of styles.

He deserves credit for all that and more.

This is true. He wrote in what a more sophisticated writer would maybe consider dumbed down - “gobs of fruit” wasn’t a line a Brit would ever use. But he always let you know where he stood - he loved a wine or didn’t care for it at all. He was good in that respect.

And as John said, in his earlier days, he was a force for change.

Early on, he would definitely slam a famous wine. But that was the early Bob. After he got medals from the French, how often did he slam a famous wine, especially from Bordeaux?

I can only comment on what I know, as I have zero knowledge of Spain and less of italy, I’ll skip those points.

You can find a lot of weak reviews for famous BDX, Lafite, Figeac, Cheval, Mouton and others all took hits. And inthe reverse, he gave 100 Pt scores to Pontet Canet, Smith Haut Lafitte, Haut Bailly and others. My point is not whether you or others agree or not, it’s just an acknowledgment that he was fearless and independent on his calls.

And he began to demonstrate a very thin skin.

Perhaps, but I can’t blame him. The board was free and it became a pissing match on who could post the rudest comments. There was a complete lack of civility. And he picked up the tab for people to do that.

But out of that, good things came. This board would never have existed. I would not have my site. And almost every new critic today came from him as well, Antonio, Neal, Lisa, Jeb and more.

He hired his buddy to review wines he knew nothing about.

Jay was worse than a bad call. That hurt him and his brand. Pierre was also not suited to be a reviewer. But Jay was a costly embarrassment. Bob should have dropped him. But Bob is one of the most loyal people I know. If he booked a ticket on the Titanic, he would have ridden it all the way down.

IMO, wine, the world of wine, wine tasting and wine criticism is all better today due to his influence. Bordeaux, The Rhône Valley, Napa and the Central Coast should all put up statues of him.

One other thing in his favor that most of you don’t know, he was always humble when visiting a property. When he showed up, he was always on time, and even though everyone was there waiting for him, he introduced himself to the front office as if he had never been there before.

There will never be a single critic with that power again. The Internet makes it too easy for multiple voices to appear.

But his impact was huge.

[Wes_Barton]

Except that his palate remained consistent on traditionally ripe wines. As you point out, he rated riper wines well. I think that’s because they played well to the metrics that worked for him in judging the types of traditionally ripe wines he likes. Winemakers picked up on that and made riper wines to mimic what some “great” vintages gave, and it worked. Call it cynical and lazy on the winemakers’ parts, going for the “easy A” with contrived wines, rather than use their honest judgment to make what they felt were the best wines. (To be clear, there are masters of riper wines, so it’s not all gimmicky bullshit sadness.)

The wines he rated highly (which often meant scores “just” in the mid 90s) in vintages like 82, 85, 86, 89 and 90 weren’t as ripe as vintages in this century, though, and I thought his assessments of Northern Rhones in that era were good. Those wines weren’t out of whack. Not to mention “big” Napa wines in that era, which were probably 14%, maybe 14.4%, instead of 15.5%.

Not sure your point here. Mine is that the wines changed, not his palate. That in later years, when he tasted traditionally ripe wines, he was spot-on and consistent with how he rated those sorts of wines in the '80s.

[Bruce_G1]

It’s interesting to see a Parker thread still provides for spirited conversation.

Mr. Parker’s presence certainly caused changes in the wine world.
Some of those changes have been for the good, and some for the bad. I don’t see how a knowledgeable, honest assessment could come to any other conclusion.
Quantifying Parker’s responsibility for either the good or the bad is impossible, since the wine world is constantly buffeted by forces of change that make for a very complex picture. Would Bordeaux have turned to making the kinds of wines he championed had he not been around? Maybe not. Would Bordeaux have seen a noticeable increase in quality, and a very strong up-turn in economic fortunes without his input?.. very easy to argue that these trends were going to proceed regardless.
In line with this, I think Parker’s impact on the world of wine will be seen as fleeting. The history of wine is quite broad and deep, and teasing out influences is a very difficult thing to do. One hundred years from now I think Mr. Parker’s name will likely still be known, but it won’t be considered all that relevant to wine circa 2122.
This is not an attempt to downplay the importance of his work. It’s just an acknowledgement that this thing is bigger than any one person.

[Tim_Heaton]

It’s interesting to see a Parker thread still provides for spirited conversation.

Mr. Parker’s presence certainly caused changes in the wine world.
Some of those changes have been for the good, and some for the bad. I don’t see how a knowledgeable, honest assessment could come to any other conclusion.
Quantifying Parker’s responsibility for either the good or the bad is impossible, since the wine world is constantly buffeted by forces of change that make for a very complex picture. Would Bordeaux have turned to making the kinds of wines he championed had he not been around? Maybe not. Would Bordeaux have seen a noticeable increase in quality, and a very strong up-turn in economic fortunes without his input?.. very easy to argue that these trends were going to proceed regardless.
In line with this, I think Parker’s impact on the world of wine will be seen as fleeting. The history of wine is quite broad and deep, and teasing out influences is a very difficult thing to do. One hundred years from now I think Mr. Parker’s name will likely still be known, but it won’t be considered all that relevant to wine circa 2122.
This is not an attempt to downplay the importance of his work. It’s just an acknowledgement that this thing is bigger than any one person.

exactly this, imo. Bravo, Bruce

[Greg_K]

A tautology is a proposition such as “Bachelors are never-married men.” They are what Kant calls synthetically true, or true by definition. Other philosophers call them trivially true. Whatever kind of true they are, they are true. I suppose you could disagree with a claim that Bachelors are never married men, but it would be hard to know what you are thinking.

A tautological argument is one that assumes its conclusion (whether the conclusion is true or not), which the author did here. The author’s view is that Parker did nothing more than reflect the American palate, so by definition he could not have been responsible for “Parkerization” because he was just a reflection of the American wine drinking id. I disagree with the author’s argument because I disagree with his assumption.

The claim that Parker was certainly partially responsible for Parkerization, by contrast, begs the question. This does not mean it raises some other question. It means it assumes an answer that is the point of the dispute. It is possible to disagree with that. I don’t know that I do, but I am certainly less certain than you are.

No, it doesn’t beg the question. Begging the question is basically the same as a tautological argument, which would be the case here if I assumed Parker was partially responsible for Parkerization. You can argue I’ve not presented evidence, but I’ve made no such assumption.

Being irrelevant to the present moment was, of course, my point. He will be an important part of any history of wine criticism, should such an insignificant topic ever have a history of it written. A prominent historian did write a very interesting history of the wine trade in England, so one can hope. But the present moment and not the writing of history is where we are on this board. I expect that the only people who care about Parker any more have axes to grind one way or another. On the other hand, as a friend of mine interviewing a perspective graduate student who suspected that his department (known for literary theorists) had an axe to grind, answered, “Well, either you have an axe to grind, or you don’t have an axe.” I’m afraid, when it comes to this topic, I am lacking in axes.

1. It’s not irrelevant to the present moment. If something was irrelevant to the present moment it wouldn’t have generated the article or a subsequent discussion.
2. Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean it’s no longer relevant. It’s quite clear that Parker’s influence remains meaningful to this day. There is plenty of wine criticism that is no longer relevant - we’re not much concerned with Pliny the Elder’s thoughts on Falernian and Chian vintages. Parker isn’t quite so remote.
3. This board spends lots of time on the historical aspects of wine.
4. I have absolutely no axes to grind with Parker and someone just posted about how the article and the discussion are meaningful to them today. If you want to say you find this discussion uninteresting, that’s fine! That does not make it uninteresting.

You need to look up tautology in the dictionary. In logic, it mean just what you deny it does. In looser speech it can mean a redundancy such as the phrase a general consensus. In neither case, is it easy to see what it would mean to disagree with it. I guess you mean the article begs the question. But if your one sentence assertion of certainty does not do that, it’s hard to see why the article’s more extended series of assertions, whose contravertibility it at least recognizes, does.

Parker hasn’t reviewed wine for some years. If a taste remains for wines that get called Parkerized, it isn’t because of his reviews. I guess the argument over whether he caused that taste can still be of intellectual interest to those who like to beat dead horses. God knows I am guilty enough of that at times.

As I tried to suggest, I believe it’s better to have an axe to grind than not to have an axe. Just not in this case, I guess, where it’s hard to get worked up enough over the conflict to actually pick up an axe and sharpen it. The only axe I have here is the defense of the article’s lapidary tone.

Lol, I literally looked up tautology in a dictionary and it translates to literally what I wrote. I’m not interested in a discussion with someone who’s trying to be difficult for its own sake. Good luck!