With his stubborn
disregard for the hierarchy of wines, Robert Parker, the straight-talking
American wine critic, is revolutionizing the industry -- and teaching the
French wine establishment some lessons it would rather not learn
by William Langewiesche
Reprinted with permission from The Atlantic Monthly Company.
THE most influential critic in the world today happens to be a
critic of wine. He is not a snob or an obvious aesthete, as one might
imagine, but an ordinary American, a burly, awkward, hardworking guy from
the backcountry of northern Maryland, about half a step removed from the
farm. His name is Robert Parker Jr., Bob for short, and he has no formal
training in wine. He lives near his childhood home, among the dairies and
second-growth forests in a place called Monkton, which has a post office
but no town center. A new interstate highway has reduced the drive to
Baltimore to merely thirty minutes, but otherwise has had little effect.
Monkton remains rural and bland -- a patch of forgotten America as
culturally isolated and nondescript as the quietest parts of the Midwest.
Parker likes it that way. He is married to his high school sweetheart,
Pat, with whom he has a teenage daughter named Maia, adopted as an infant
from a Korean orphanage. The family has a quiet and apparently idyllic
domestic life. Parker seems to be a happy man. In repose he has the staid
face of an affluent farmer. In his baggy shirts and summer shorts, with
his heavy arms hanging wide, he looks as if he could wrestle down a cow.
He couldn't, because at age
fifty-three he has a bad back. But here's how strong he has become: many
people now believe that Robert Parker is single-handedly changing the
history of wine. That's saying a lot. There are more than forty
wine-producing countries in the world today, of which France is the first
and the United States is the fourth; China is on the list. These countries
have planted 30,000 square miles of vineyards and are making the
equivalent of 35 billion bottles of wine every year. Parker directly
controls the merest patch of all this -- a micro-winery called Beaux Frères, near
Newburg, Oregon, which he owns with his brother-in-law and refuses to
promote. The wines produced there (from pinot noir grapes) are not
necessarily among the best, but they keep Parker from sounding off about
winemaking as, he says, a eunuch might sound off about sex. He is not an
exporter, an importer, or a money man. He is a self-employed consumer
advocate, a crusader in a peculiarly American tradition. It's really very
simple, or so it seems at first. Parker samples 10,000 wines a year. He
sniffs and sips them, and scribbles little notes. Some of the wines are
good, and some are not -- according to Parker. If he is changing wine
history, as people claim, it is purely through the expression of his
taste.
His base is a cramped two-room office in his house in Monkton, where
the family's bulldog and basset hound like to lie on the tile floor and
sleep and fart and snore. Parker has an acute sense of smell, but unless
he is tasting wine, he enjoys their presence. The two secretaries who work
in the outer office are less understanding. They told me that they, too,
like the dogs but often usher them outside. The older of the secretaries
has worked for Parker for years, but has never learned to enjoy wine. She
is dedicated to Parker, as women close to him tend to be, in a protective
and motherly way. Parker's real mother, who handles the office mail, has a
different approach. She is said to be tough and unimpressed. One afternoon
Parker, in a self-pitying mood, mentioned to her that for years he had
received only letters of complaint. She fixed him with a stare and said,
"That's because they're the only ones I've let you see."
Her instincts were probably good. Parker seems to have trouble
distinguishing friends from sycophants, and he sets too much store by the
compliments he receives. He does his best work not in public but in his
private inner office, where he is left mostly alone. That office has a
messy desk and a computer, a stereo stacked with CDs (Bob Dylan, Neil
Young), a countertop crowded with bottles, a rack of clean wine glasses,
and a sink that is deep enough to allow for spitting without splattering.
There he writes and publishes an un-illustrated journal called
The Wine
Advocate, subtitled "The Independent Consumer's Bimonthly Guide to
Fine Wine."
The Wine Advocate accepts no advertising. A subscription costs
$50 a year. Each issue consists of an editorial or two and about fifty-six
pages of blunt commentaries on wines that Parker has recently tasted. The
commentaries are short, usually two or three sentences, grouped by region
and winery, and associated with "Parker Points," which are scores on a
scale of 50 to 100. One of the lowest scores Parker ever gave a new
vintage was 56, for 1979 Lambert Bridge Cabernet Sauvignon, about which he
wrote, "One has to wonder what this winery does to its cabernet to make it
so undrinkable.... This wine has an intense vegetative, barnyard aroma and
very unusual flavors." But generally, poor wines score in the 70s,
adequate ones in the 80s, and really good ones in the 90s. There are
significant gradations within those ranges. Rarely, Parker has given a
wine a perfect score of 100 -- seventy-six times out of 220,000 wines
tasted. He always lists an approximate retail price and provides an
opinion about when the wine will be ready to drink. He works hard to avoid
conflicts of interest: he pays his own way, accepts no gifts or payoffs,
and does not speculate financially on wine. As a result he has an
unimpeachable reputation for integrity in an industry that does not.
The Wine Advocate has 40,000 subscribers, in every U.S. state
and thirty-seven foreign countries. These are influential readers, and
they pass the issues around, igniting the markets of Asia, the United
States, and now even Europe, where collectors and wealthy consumers can be
counted on to search out wines on the basis of Parker's recommendations.
The effects are felt on store shelves, where retailers display Parker's
comments or scores, and up the supply chain, influencing speculation,
negotiation, and price-setting, until even the producers of mass wines
feel the weight of Parker's opinions. The trade has never known such a
voice, such a power, before. When it comes to the great wines -- those
that drive styles and prices for the entire industry -- there is hardly
another critic now who counts.
The effects are global. As wines rise
and fall on the basis of Parker's judgments, and as producers respond to
his presence, the industry worldwide is moving in an unexpected direction,
toward denser, darker, and more dramatic wines. It would be simplistic to
believe that the movement is entirely due to Parker: he may just be its
most effective agent. In any case, these denser, darker, wines are the
wines that Parker and now much of the world prefer to drink. Because they
require intensive thinning and pruning of the vines, hand harvesting, and
at the winemaking stage the sort of attention to detail that can be
achieved only one vat at a time, they lend themselves to production on a
reduced scale. At the extreme they are known as "garage wines,"
smaller-scale even than "micro-wines" -- so small that some are produced
in garage-size buildings. Such wines are often absurdly expensive, because
they are rare and fashionable. That's the bad side. But they allow
producers without much money (or the ability to attract large investments)
to make a living by making wine. That's the surprise. With his
single-minded concentration on taste and his unique ability to communicate
his opinion, Parker may be pioneering a new kind of globalization -- not
the monolith that the world dreads but the monolith's counterforce: a
boutique economy that is American in inspiration, individualistic, and
anti-industrial at the core.
In France especially -- the country, ironically, that fights against
the McDonald's-ization of the world -- this new form of entrepreneurial
winemaking is being resisted. It's easy to understand why. France has long
been the bastion of big-time wines. Parker threatens these wines, and the
companies and families that produce them. Particularly in Bordeaux, the
culturally conservative city that is widely considered to be the world
capital of wine, winemakers are engaged in an increasingly bitter fight
against Parker and his influence. This year the fight has broken into the
open.
"A Democratic View"
It's a
strange position for a man from Monkton. One commonly heard explanation
for it is that Parker writes in English at a time when English use is
increasing around the globe. But the British, who are the traditional wine
critics, write in English too, and they don't enjoy anything like Parker's
clout. Many of them have a diploma called the Master of Wine, or M.W., for
which they've been required to pass tests -- based largely on the
identification of obscure or antique wines -- that Parker would probably
fail. Parker's eminence is therefore annoying to them. They see Parker,
correctly, as an American upstart. They see him as a heathen.
Lineage counts for a lot with the British critics and is accorded
proper deference. At their worst they seem to practice criticism as an
excuse for Continental excursions: the villages were picturesque, the
peasants were quaint, and the wines were "noble" above all. In contrast,
Parker's criticism sounds like his mother's -- direct and pointed, like
one American talking straight to another. There are other American critics
too, of course, but none who has been able to equal the directness and
authenticity of Parker's voice. Last April, after tasting the most recent
offering of Canon, a famous producer in Bordeaux, Parker gave the wine a
score of 84-85 and wrote,
Once again, this renowned estate appears to
have badly missed the mark. Undoubtedly, part of the difficulty in 1999
was the fact that the vineyard was hit by the hail storm that punished a
small zone of vineyards on September 5th. This medium dark ruby-colored
effort reveals soft, berry flavors with steely/mineral-like notes in the
background. Some of the vineyard's pedigree comes through, but this
uninspiring, medium-bodied wine possesses little depth or length.
Anticipated maturity: now-2008.
It's an intentional style, and more difficult to achieve than it seems
-- prose so plain and clear that it reads like a subway map. It is also a
particular outlook. Last spring in Monkton, Parker said to me, "What I've
brought is a democratic view. I don't give a shit 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."
That's the sort of English everyone can understand -- and the big
French winemaking families don't like it at all. Those families are some
of the most conservative in Europe, masters of understatement and
judgmental silence. They are epitomized by the wine aristocrats of
Bordeaux, who pioneered the production of modern red wine 300 years ago,
and who ever since have been able, on the basis of their wines' lineage
alone, to set the standards and prices for the industry worldwide:
traditionally, if they declared that their wine was the most desirable in
the world, then whatever its real merits, it was accepted as such. Anyone
who disagreed, said the Bordelais, simply did not know wine. The magic
here lay, of course, in the tight control of definitions. It provided for
an enviable commercial position, and allowed the Bordelais to pull off a
double trick -- producing very large quantities of very high-priced wines.
But Parker is changing all that. It is getting harder for the Bordelais to
disregard the laws of supply and demand, or the fact that their great
wines aren't always very good.
Bordeaux is the key to understanding Parker's role in the world. It
produced many of the truly fine wines on which he built his reputation,
yet as a place that has come to rely on the techniques of modern
high-yield production, it stands as the most important example of the
industrialization in wine that he has been fighting against. Bordeaux is
big business in disguise. The composition of the aristocracy there has
changed over time, but outsiders who have bought into it have always
eagerly adapted, mimicking the old families so willingly that by the
second generation their carpetbagging is almost forgotten. In recent years
a slew of publicly held corporations have bought in as well, and even they
have played along, furnishing their chateaux with antiques and hiring the
second sons of the aristocracy to make their wines in imitation of
tradition. This is considered respectable, civic-minded behavior -- and
indeed it is, in a place that has staked its fortunes on its power to
define the meaning of taste.
In Bordeaux the wines are made not of single grape varietals but of
ever-changing combinations. Those combinations have been based on the
cabernet sauvignon grape, with varying amounts of merlot, cabernet franc,
and another, rarer grape, petit verdot, mixed in according to each
winemaker's calculation, to provide a bit of "depth," or to intensify the
wine. The result has traditionally been complex, light-colored wines,
epitomized by the elegant "clarets" produced by the old vineyards north of
the city, in an area called the Médoc, on
the left bank of the river Gironde. The British have traded in claret
since the 1700s, and they have long understood the rules of the game.
There are unfortunate years of too much cold or rain, but if the wine is
thin, then it is subtle or laudably austere. If it is undrinkably acidic
or astringent when young, then, like a family inheritance, it is not
intended to be consumed soon but to be put away to mellow, for future
generations to enjoy.
But now comes this Parker, a man as naive as America, with his raw
talent, his disproportionate weight, and his stubborn disregard for the
hierarchy of taste. It is maddening to the Bordelais that even in France
consumers increasingly are using him as a reference. The Bordelais believe
Parker favors dark and dramatic wines -- wines that they claim are at
their most impressive when they are young in the glass, or competing in
organized wine tastings, and that, more ominously, may well lack a
pedigree. Wines like these depend more heavily on the merlot grape than on
the cabernet sauvignon. To some degree they have long existed on the
Gironde's right bank, around St.-Emilion and Pomerol, areas that in the context of the Médoc are
considered to be newcomers, producing plebeian and somewhat simplistic
wines. The new small wines are like those right-bank wines, only more so
-- darker, more intense, and, to the untutored palate, more accessible.
These are the boutique growths, the so-called garage wines, that are
starting to command the highest prices, and they are spreading like a rot
through the region. Parker is to blame.
The old families try to hold steady. Last spring when I went to
Bordeaux to ask them about Parker, they told me that he is deferential,
that he visits twice a year, that he maintains a small Bordeaux office
from which he publishes The Wine Advocate's only foreign-language
edition, and that he pays homage to the region as the reference point for
the world. But they also admitted, when pressed a bit, that he terrifies
them. When Parker criticizes their wines, they see their prices tumble.
When he compliments their wines, they can't resist using this to their
advantage and proclaiming their scores. In private they complain that he
is playing them like puppets. In public, for business reasons, they smile
and pretend to be his friends. The duplicity is humiliating -- and worse,
it signals their loss of control.
You have to admire these people for their sense of irony. In the region
of Bordeaux one day, one of them -- impeccably dressed in jacket and tie,
in an office where Thomas Jefferson went to taste wine, with portraits of
ancestors hanging on the walls -- made the argument to me, with just the
slightest hint of humor in his eyes, that Bordeaux should erect a statue
of Parker in honor of his contributions. It was the sort of dry joke he
might have made to his patrician friends. Twice in the past ten years the
Bordelais have arranged through local politicians to award Parker a
national medal, the more recent of which was the Legion of Honor --
France's highest award. It was presented to Parker at a ceremony in Paris
in June of last year, by President Jacques Chirac, for having promoted
French wines. Parker accepted the medal with tears in his eyes.
If reform is a form of promotion, Parker has promoted French
wines -- and perhaps some families felt that he deserved credit for that.
But more likely they intended the medal as a public acknowledgment that
they would have to find some way to live with him. The impulse is well
known: you give a man a badge when you can't shut him up. Not that they
hadn't tried. By the time of the Paris ceremony the French had sued Parker
for what he had written, sued him for what he had not written, and even
sued him for something in between -- a mistake in translation. (A cellar
that Parker called "disgusting" became "dégueulasse" -- literally,
"nauseating," which was more than he'd meant to say.) They had forced him
into formal public apologies. They had cost him hundreds of thousands of
dollars in legal fees. They had banned him from their estates, fired his
friends, mounted whispering campaigns against him, and pilloried him
numerous times in French newspapers and magazines. To top it all, through
blacklisting and a coordinated effort to render him useless to his
readers, they had exploited a series of mistakes that Parker had made and
had almost managed to run him out of Burgundy. The story of Parker's
failure in Burgundy is long and complicated and not particularly relevant
to Bordeaux. But in no country other than France has anything similar
happened to him. Parker told me that he didn't want to sound like Oliver
Stone, though he seemed sometimes to believe in conspiracies. And maybe
for good reason. His life is not at risk, of course, but people in
Bordeaux talked openly to me about setting him up for a drunk-driving
arrest. Parker told me that several years ago one of them attacked him
with a dog.
It was a small dog, but aggressive. Parker was in his hotel room in
Bordeaux one night, working on the day's notes, when he got a phone call
from Jacques Hébrard, the family manager of a famous chateau called Cheval Blanc, whose recent vintage Parker had described
as a disappointment. Because Hébrard was very angry, Parker agreed to
visit the chateau the following night, after his regular schedule of work,
in order to retaste the wine. At the agreed-upon time he knocked on the
chateau door. When it opened, a snarling schnauzer came out, leaped into
the air, and clamped onto Parker's leg. Hébrard stood in the doorway,
staring into Parker's face and making no attempt to intervene. After
several attempts Parker managed to shake off the dog, which went tumbling
into the night. Parker followed Hébrard into an office, where he saw that
his pants were torn and blood was running down his leg. He asked Hébrard
for a bandage. Hébrard came across the room and glanced disdainfully at
the wound. Without saying a word, he went to the far side of a desk,
pulled out a copy of The Wine Advocate, and slammed it down hard.
He said, "This is what you wrote about my wine!"
In his simplified French, Parker said, "That's why I'm here. To retaste
it. Because you think I'm wrong."
"Well, I'm not going to let you retaste it."
Parker got as belligerent as he gets. He said, "Look. I came here at
the end of the day. You said I could taste your wine. I've been bitten by
your dog. If I was wrong about this wine, I will be the first to say so."
Hébrard stalked out of the office. Parker thought he would have to get
up and leave. But then Hébrard came back and said, "Okay, let's go taste
the wine." Parker limped after him to the tasting room. He was quick, as
he always is; he tasted the wine twice to be sure, as is his habit, and
realized to his chagrin that Hébrard was right -- the wine was better than
he had thought. He returned to his hotel to wash his wound. As a critic
who often has to condemn the efforts of people he likes, he now had the
equally hard task of admitting that Hébrard's work was top-notch. For the
families of Bordeaux it was satisfying: Parker had been punished for his
judgment. With luck he would have a little scar as a souvenir.
Continued...
(The online version of this article appears in four parts. Click
here to go to part two,
part three, or
part four.)
William
Langewiesche is a correspondent for The Atlantic.
Photographs by
Christopher Barker.
Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights
reserved.
The
Atlantic Monthly; December 2000; The Million-Dollar Nose - 00.12;
Volume 286, No. 6; page 42-70.
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