Anyone with a passion for wine would be well advised to pick up a copy of Elin McCoy's new book, The Emperor of Wine (Harper Collins, $25.95). The subheading is a distillation of what the book is really about. It reads: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste. Yep, we're the biggest and toughest kids on the block, even in the wine world.
Perhaps you've heard the outcry about the globalization of the world's wines, and the complaints with regard to international wine consultants. Their sole purpose, according to detractors, is to produce wines of uniform quality without regard to terroir, the individual character of growing areas.
In simple terms, the days of sniffing wine and identifying the vintage and producer á la 007 are over because there are just too many wines. Even professional tasters have trouble distinguishing wines by origin or even, at times, by grape variety. Is that pinot from Oregon, New Zealand or Burgundy? Sometimes we know, sometimes we don't.
Robert Parker's enormous influence is partly blamed for this trend in Emperor, for liking "ripe, succulent wines"—often unfiltered—and ones described by wine tasters as "jammy." In other words, big, fruity and in your face.
The recent documentary Mondovino (not yet screened in Las Vegas) eloquently deals with the subject. Writer-director Jonathan Nossiter laments that wines are all starting to taste the same. (For the record, I tend to agree, but because the result generally is a product I like better, I'm not in a mood to complain.)
The book, which Parker graciously but firmly refused to comment on, raises important questions about the validity of one man being all-powerful in a critical area, and the very nature of taste itself.
You may not know who Parker is but you are affected by his pronouncements when you buy wine. Most wine stores have little cards pasted to the shelves under bottles with Parker's numerical ratings written on them. Supermarket chains also use his numbers from time to time. So, on occasion, do restaurants.
Parker publishes an influential, bimonthly newsletter, The Wine Advocate, sold to some 45,000 subscribers, in which he rates wines on a 100-point scale. If wines score more than 90, it is virtually guaranteed that their prices will increase and they quickly will disappear from the shelves.
A score of 95-plus means there will be serious competition to buy the wine, often followed by an allocation by the producers. McCoy cites one example of a merchant in Los Angeles, the Wine House, posting two Parker ratings on a pair of Chardonnays of comparable prices, one at 92, the other at 84. The higher-rated wine outsold its competitor 10 to one.
Thus, if a wine scores 80 or below, merchants will drop it like a hot potato. As one wag I know in LA put it: "If Parker kills a wine, it's dead."
How did one man get to be in such a powerful position? It began when Parker had an epiphany while visiting his then-fiancée, an American exchange student in France, becoming obsessed with wine. He later moved on to a tasting group and then a small, under-financed newsletter. Within a few years, he gave up a successful law practice to, in Joseph Campbell's words, "follow his bliss." He has not looked back since.
What turned the wine world on its ear and paved the way for Parker's success, according to McCoy, was the legendary Paris Tasting of 1976. Nine elite, French wine judges rated a variety of California wines above some of the greatest labels in France, creating a wine culture in this country that has continued to grow ever since. It was two years later that Parker launched The Wine Advocate.
Today, Parker is a celebrity, a rock star, who tastes almost 10,000 wines a year, according to McCoy. His secret weapon is "his ability to mentally compare the wine in front of him with all the other wines of the same type he'd tasted over the years," she writes. He claims not to suffer from palate fatigue when tasting 50 to 125 wines two times a week. I guess we will just have to take his word for it.
Or not.
Either way, it's really not that relevant. The key issues is that there are simply too many factors in wine-tasting to make one person's taste so dominant. It's possible to tell whether or not a wine is at its peak, or if it has been made well, but it's impossible to correctly predict a reaction. Everyone has a different body chemistry, and this affects the way we taste. If you like beets better than celery, who is anyone to say you are wrong?
Instead, do what Parker does. Swirl, sniff, taste and then follow your bliss. Just don't expect to get paid for it.
Parker's opinions and ratings can be found on his website,
www.erobertparker.com.