Long absences due to illness followed by restricted activity followed by sale of the business and then retirement. That, combined with the “democratization” or “dumbing down” of criticism (take your pick) due to the interwebs, and his decline is pretty easily explained.
Add to that continuing physical decline, a few unhinged rants that may have been due to meds and/or alcohol, and the inability to continue eating and drinking to excess without regard to health once you are in your seventies. Finally, little or at least very bad, succession planning.
I’m no fan of Parker’s criticism or his comportment post 00, but, really, getting old and retiring is a thing that happens. All things considered, I’d say he did fairly well for himself. The fact that he’s not a factor couldn’t have been avoided as long as he was someday going to stop writing. No one listens to Pauline Kael on current films either.
I agree. Robert Parker accomplished a lot. Many if not most modern wine newsletters are largely based on the format (including the 100 point scale) that he developed. He became the foremost wine critic in the world. Perhaps, most importantly, he got to spend his life making a very good living tasting most of the great wines in the world.
I am enjoying retirement and am in good health. I certainly do not expect my clients and colleagues to expect to keep talking about what I did during my career or that somehow I am still relevant. I am sure Robert Parker feels the same. I hope that he is enjoying retirement and getting his health together. He had a fabulous career.
Except that we are all still talking about him, the good and the bad. His heights were spectacular. I agree with Howard’s post. His scoring and notes legacy will continue despite the cacaphony we now hear about points. His demise, however, was not a poof, but instead, a very long, drawn-out, painful process for many of us to watch. Like a train wreck. Quite sad really, except for the snarky comments and “us versus them” mantra that he started to champion.
Exactly. There is a big difference between enjoying 2 sips of a wine and 2 full glasses of the wine. There are plenty of times when I’m initially underwhelmed by a wine, but by the second glass I’m fully in love. The opposite rarely happens (where I initially “love” the wine, and then don’t), but there are times where a fruit bomb seems at least promising, due to some unique character it may have, but after half a glass I’m unable to continue drinking it because it becomes cloying and overly heavy.
Well, if someone was listening to Pauline Kael today, that would be pretty cool. She could criticize the life hereafter or whatever there is!
As for Bob -
Many here on this board have and had a distinct anti Parker bias. He was the man in wine critic for 2 decades. He was successful as nobody else. And he was a very good taster IMO. I had controversies with him. But I had the feeling that many people hate him. I didn’t understand this hefty dislike until this day. On the old Squires Board there were uncritical sycophants too. But there is a saying in German I don’t know I can translate properly. Mercy is for free – for envy you have to work hard. I think this describes the phenomenon Parker.
Parker was loved too much and hated too much while he was the leading wine critic for some reason. I wish him well.
What dismays me is the way that these competing critics have all raised their scoring. Now you can piss in a bucket and expect 90 points. It’s especially problematic in Australia with the Halliday scoring, where 95 is now quite a normal score. Parker used to use a much bigger range: go to one of his old books and even premier cru Burgundies from good producers are being scored in the 80s. Now a score is close to meaningless, and it muddies the waters for everyone else. Scores are imperfect, but at least they used to be a useful shorthand for how much the reviewer liked the wine.
Yes, it has been a “points race” for some time. I think the reason is pretty clear: you distinguish yourself and get attention as a critic by doling out high points for wines, which subsequently get you shelf talkers (both brick and mortar, and electronic email blasts). You want your name used to sell wine (and therefore gain a larger following of subscribers) you have to give out high points. If you’re rational, and give 80-90 to most wines, with the odd mid 90s, and exceptionally rare high 90s/100, no one will know who you are.
Do you think 1er Cru Burgundies from good producers are still middling good these days? Most (not all!) folks would say that quality is up across the board from the 1980s.
Just came from Australia and had the exact conversation about Halliday. There’s apparently a few critics there who are followed. Sarah Ahmed is one.
d66 ruined WA for me. Lots of big scores from WA, and the only wine in the last six years that every person in the room has poured out.
What in the heck is d66?
Dave Phinney’s French Project. Le Swift Orin.
I think another dimension to this is that sub-90 scores don’t really impact the market one way or another. If, in the final analysis, scoring wine is about directing readers to wines that one likes and away from wines that one doesn’t, that’s a problem. This is especially an issue in regions where the wines can’t trade on the cachet of existing reputations. If I give a very good Vosne-Romanée AOC 88/100, the wine will continue to sell just fine and consumers won’t be deterred from tasting it. But if I taste an excellent Beaujolais-Villages from a serious producer and give it 88/100, that will do next to nothing to make consumers try that wine—and by extension next to nothing to encourage that producer to continue e.g. farming well, limiting yields, etc.
Speaking personally, I do not give any thought to shelf talkers when I review wines, and I think serious consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical of hyperbole in any case. But I do want to direct wine drinkers to excellence (as I perceive it), and to encourage producers in economically marginal appellations (e.g. Beaujolais-Villages, Mâcon-Villages, the Côte Chalonnaise) to pursue quality and improvement.
Lest this be misunderstood, this is not in any sense a defense of ‘grade inflation’. I think I’m a pretty conservative scorer and I try to score wines on a broad range that meaningfully differentiates nice from nasty. But it is a point worth thinking about pragmatically.
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Reading this reminds me of why I am so glad I was taught to use words instead of numbers to sell wine.
This couldn’t help but remind me of what we’d tell our pre-school aged daughter when she was frustrated and headed towards a meltdown: “Use your words.” Not to say that critics are infants throwing tantrums. But that one can communicate so much more with words than with one syllable or two digit utterances.
Scores used to be useful to me, in conjunction with TNs, when critics would use a wider range. The compression and inflation have made them much less useful. Have wines generally improved over the last 30 year? Sure. But the curve has to be recalibrated if scores are to be useful adjuncts to TNs once again. Even if it means you can’t compare a 2015 Pichon Lalande to a 1982 Pichon Lalande on scores alone. Just like you can’t compare Wilt to Kareem to LeBron. A wider score range will never happen. Mostly because high scores are a promotional advantage for the critics.
But nobody reads the words. Seriously.
A few people on this board read them but the average wine consumer couldn’t care less because they can’t taste graphite and have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about minerals and torrefaction and all that. Points are a clean, simple way to indicate whether or not you like a wine and that’s why they’re so effective, or at least were so effective. I guess today rather than a ninety you would give it a “like”.
William touched on it in his post:
scoring wine is about directing readers to wines that one likes and away from wines that one doesn’t, that’s a problem. This is especially an issue in regions where the wines can’t trade on the cachet of existing reputations. If I give a very good Vosne-Romanée AOC 88/100, the wine will continue to sell just fine and consumers won’t be deterred from tasting it. But if I taste an excellent Beaujolais-Villages from a serious producer and give it 88/100, that will do next to nothing to make consumers try that wine—and by extension next to nothing to encourage that producer to continue e.g. farming well, limiting yields, etc.
I really doubt that the producer is going to change anything based on a score. Parker moved product so people wanted to please him. There just isn’t anyone who can move product like that these days, so very few people are going to make business decisions based on the scores of one critic or another. If they find a critic that can clear out their cellar, they’ll probably behave differently, but those days are probably gone.
As far as anti-Parker, I agree there’s a bias but a lot of it is because this board wouldn’t exist without most of the people being kicked off. There was an anti-Parker bias starting before that too, and partly it was because people felt let down once they found that he wasn’t tasting blind as he had always claimed and that people on his staff weren’t quite ethical. It’s been rehashed numerous times, but he undermined himself with many of his biggest fans and eventually people moved on. I don’t believe the US wine market, and perhaps the world wine market, would be anything like it is today without him though.
I don’t disagree Greg. My personal preference for words differs from that of the typical consumer and reader of shelf talkers.