Decanter Hall of Fame Award 2020: Robert M Parker Jr Andrew Jefford
The most influential wine critic of all time? He can’t be described as anything less than a towering presence over the last four decades. Prolific, informed, at times divisive, always unflinchingly honest, Parker’s writings have made fortunes and redefined wine styles in some of the most famous regions – and become the go-to reference for wine collectors, investors and trade alike. Having set down his wine critic’s pen for good, the time is right for Robert Parker to enter the Decanter Hall of Fame. Andrew Jefford explains why
Robert M Parker Jr is the 37th entrant to the Decanter Hall of Fame (previously Decanter Man of the Year) – or, more accurately, the 39th, since in 1985 and 2014 the award was shared by two recipients. He may well be the most controversial.
Decanter itself never formally adopted a position of antagonism towards Parker or his work, but Decanter contributors and readers often have, notably in the magazine’s Letters forum. Hostility to the man from Maryland focused on his use of points scores, the trenchancy of his verdicts, the undiplomatic asperity of his responses to criticism, his peremptory dismissal of the wine-tasting skills and scholarship of others, the effect of his scores on the price of fine wines, and what were perceived to be his stylistic penchants.
Now that Robert Parker has hung up his tasting glass for good and The Wine Advocate sits in the Michelin portfolio, readers may be wondering why Decanter has chosen this moment to recognise his achievements.
Well, here’s why...
Whole new level
Robert Parker is the only rock star the wine world has ever produced. By that metaphor, I mean a figure whose reach and influence is global, and whose name had a resonance beyond the confines of wine traders, enthusiasts, geeks and nerds. He not only expanded that circle of enthusiasm colossally, but he altered and lifted the aesthetic parameters of what was possible in every wine-producing region around the world. He did this directly in some cases, notably in Bordeaux, in California and in the Rhône Valley, but indirectly in other cases – simply by generating excitement and thrills about great wine itself.
‘Robert Parker is the only rock star the wine world has ever produced’
He brought untold wealth (millions of dollars or euros) to the community of wine producers by championing their individual efforts, but he also dragged whole regions into a new, lustrous light they had never known before, via a circuit of uplift. His writing increased regional sales, boosted prices and raised expectations; that in turn encouraged quality increments. He made the tasting, drinking and collection of wine a sexy, aspirational and culturally rewarding activity for many around the world who had formerly considered it locked beyond their reach, the preserve of a wealthy European bourgeois elite or of snooty intellectuals.
Parker’s contagious enthusiasm was a kind of plasma jet, igniting and illuminating interest in wines wherever it reached. You may agree with his assessments or you may not, but his critical energy, his work rate and the sum of his achievement between the launch of the then-named Baltimore-Maryland Wine Advocate in August 1978 and his gradual retirement over the last decade was utterly phenomenal, unparalleled by any individual before and since, and probably unattainable in the future.
Out of the blue
How did it happen? He was brought up in a wineless household by a teetotal mother and a spirit-drinking, cigarette-smoking father. He got unpleasantly drunk on Cold Duck (sweet, cheap sparkling wine) on his 18th birthday. He won a sports scholarship to university; he was a 6’1” soccer goalie. He smoked a few joints. He became a lawyer for the Farm Credit Banks of Baltimore. He married his school sweetheart in 1969. There was no wine at the wedding.
In 1967 he had, though, visited Paris for the first time; his future wife Pat was at that point studying in Strasbourg. ‘She took me to a low-budget bistro near the Eiffel Tower,’ says Parker. ‘I would’ve preferred to drink CocaCola, but my future wife said a bottle of Coke was more expensive than a carafe of French wine. Moreover, I was in France and had to try their cuisine – the freaky looking mussels and snails. I’d consumed plenty of liquor in college, mostly cheap booze blended with fruit drinks to encourage some bravado to act like an ass around girls at parties. So a beverage low in alcohol, with an alluring perfume and vivid red and black fruits was a revelation. Maybe an epiphany. The measured, incremental euphoria was unlike anything I’d experienced. The fact that it seemed to enhance the food and make me more articulate were additional merits. I was hooked.’
He became a wine geek himself, and one so committed that he kept the apartment he shared with Pat in Maryland at 55°F (below 13°C) through the Maryland winter – so that his nascent wine collection wouldn’t be damaged. Indeed, he claims that the main reason for starting a wine publication was so that he and his tasting companion Victor Morgenroth could keep buying colossal amounts of wine without going bankrupt and thus ‘avoid losing our wives because of our obsessive behaviour’.
‘I drew a lot of my formative wine education,’ he recalls, ‘from British wine writers. Before I started The Wine Advocate in 1978, I had read all of their published works
Wine BuyerÕs Guide, tasting Sauternes in France, December 1997
and their importance in my formative years and to the foundation of The Wine Advocate was significant, although I ended up taking a completely different focus.’
To the point
That ‘different focus’ was inspired by the work of fellow-lawyer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Parker’s mark on his own lawyer’s office had been a systematic attempt to render legal documents into plain, comprehensible English and not legalese. When he charged into the world of wine, it was with a plainspeaking, Naderite mission – to unearth and enumerate great value, and to call out mediocrity, no matter how lofty a wine’s origins might be.
Like a goalie hurling himself at a penalty shot, he was neither polite nor respectful to what at the time were often very shoddy ‘fine wines’, notably those of the 1973 Bordeaux vintage, which he reviewed in the first issue.
The appearance of Parker’s newsletter in 1978 marked the birth of ‘wine criticism’ as distinct from ‘wine writing’: rigorous, thorough notes on wines complete with a suite of descriptions and allusions, some historical context and, where appropriate, comparisons with other wines and other vintages. While never literary, his standard of notetaking remains unrivalled for these qualities – and for its communicable enthusiasm, its sense of sincerity and authenticity, and its
‘When he charged into the world of wine, it was with a plainspeaking mission to unearth and enumerate great value’
The Wine Advocate (right) sheer gusto. ‘He was the first critic to give the punters what they really wanted,’ observes Stephen Browett of Farr Vintners, the UK’s most successful fine wine broker and trader, ‘which was strong, concise and clear opinions on what was good and how much better it was than another vintage or another producer. His scores were very precise and logical and became gospel.’
The distractions of features, profiles and extensive background information – ‘wine writing’ – never interested Parker. It’s also worth noting how unpompous and unpretentious the texture of Parker’s writing is – in contrast to many before and some since. He didn’t have to answer to editors and always (remarkably in the wine world) paid his own way, so he could call it as he saw it. And he did.
Off the scale
Newsletters containing reviews were already in existence at the Advocate’s birth in 1978, and the most celebrated of these in the US at the time was Robert Finigan’s Private Guide to Wines, first published in 1972; Decanter, founded in 1975, also carried reviews and ran tastings – and used scores out of 20 for major tastings. Scores as such were not a Parker innovation; the use of the 100-point scale was. ‘I was dissatisfied with the 20-point system,’ he told me in March 1995, ‘because it didn’t give me enough latitude, and the 20-point system as formulated by the University of California Davis just takes points off for faults and defects. I felt that wine criticism had to be both analytical and hedonistic, and I would lean more to the hedonistic. It is a beverage of pleasure, let’s never forget that.’
Parker began bi-annual trips to Bordeaux from 1978. When he acclaimed 1982 as a great, historic vintage while Finigan described the wines as ‘disappointing’ and ‘oafish’, his reputation was made. The first ever wine-trade lunch I attended, in 1988, was with
Portuguese wine creator Cristiano van Zeller, at that time running his family’s Quinta do Noval in the Douro. Someone mentioned ‘Bob Parker’, a new name to me back then. ‘Bob