My greatest hope for the New Year is that wine merchants will finally wake up to the reality that much of the wine-buying public is out of sync with Robert Parker (The Wine Advocate) and Jim Laube (The Wine Spectator).
Evidence mounts every day. You can find the disconnects vividly portrayed in the hundreds of wine blogs and dozens of online wine publications, such as Wine Review Online, that have sprouted over the past several years.
Robin Garr’s Wine Lovers Page is one of the oldest and most successful of these. I was intrigued by the Dec. 7, 2007 30 Second Wine Advisor posting under the headline: Parker swings, misses:
I respect Parker for his consistency. But, like a lot of other wine geeks I know, I find the wines he rates in the 90- to 100-point range to be too big, alcoholic and fruit-forward for me. The wines he dismisses in the 80-point range tend to be the kind of more subtle and elegant wines that I enjoy.
That’s all right. Different strokes, etc. But Parker’s Aug. 29, 2007 report on six new 2005 releases from one of my favorite California wineries, Edmunds St. John, crosses a line for me.
Parker rates these wines from 84 to 87 on his famous 100-point scale, which seems fair enough. Edmunds St. John is one of the few California producers that makes wines with a consistent European sensibility, respecting the soil (“terroir”) in which they’re grown. They’re wines meant to age, and wines meant to go with food; and thus perhaps not to the liking of a critic who seems to prefer amped-up, concentrated wines better suited for cocktail-style sipping.
But the language accompanying the reviews reads not merely as critical but mean-spirited, almost snide. “There appears to be a deliberate attempt to make French-styled wines,” Parker wrote. “Of course, California is not France, and therein may suggest (sic) the problem. If you want to make a French wine, do it in France.”
The article went on to say that a group of wine geeks and professionals (such as sommeliers) assembled to taste the wines Parker had dissed, and it quickly became apparent Parker was completely out of touch with the group consensus.
That’s fine, but it doesn’t make Parker wrong. What’s important for wine enthusiasts to know — particularly those who sell wine — is that Parker and Laube don’t have a lock on the truth. There are other credible voices with a completely different slant on what tastes good.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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