The Big Parkerization Lie

Lisa Perrotti-Brown in June 2018 wrote a brief piece titled “The Big Parkerization Lie” as a preface to The Wine Advocate, for which she is a contributor. The piece is a defense of Robert Parker against those that assert that by reason of his extraordinary influence with the consumer he essentially moulded all wines to be made in a manner and style that appealed to his taste, and that as a consequence all wines on the world stage increasingly tended to taste the same….the Mondovino contention.  This assertion may be revisited in the upcoming Somm 3 movie, which apparently prompted her to write this pre-emptive defense.  

Her argument runs that Parker in fact was simply ‘endorsing” a trend already in progress among consumers in preference for well made wines that had some ripe fruit.  “Wine production [in the mid 1980s} trended away from many of the thin, often faulty, lean, green, mean styles of the pre-Peynaud era, which some other writers of the day had made a career of lavishing praise upon, and trended toward cleaner, richer, riper, more fruit-forward styles. To this end, there is indeed a correlation between the snowballing consumer wine trend for riper styles and Parker’s scores for wines of this style. …Wineries throughout the world wanted a piece of the action and developed styles that fit the trend, but it was not Parker who created the trend. Consumers did."

As as example of the existence of this consumer trend Ms Perrotti-Brown herself states that “ in the early 1990s, when I embarked on a career in the wine trade, I loved big, bold, oak-driven, butterball Chardonnays—I couldn’t get enough of them.” She was not drinking them because Parker liked this style - she was a part of the consumer trend favoring big bold fruit flavors with a lot of new oak.  And so her argument runs that within the context only of those consumers who liked the Parker style and were on board with this trend anyway, he steered them towards the best examples. 

But the issue is not whether or not there was a concurrent consumer trend towards more powerful wines with more upfront fruit with Parker simply reflecting that preference or whether he actually generated that preference among consumers. The issue is not about cause and effect - on which I am anyway not qualified to express an opinion. Parker’s detractors make a different point - that he was apparently unable to acknowledge the intrinsic high quality of a wine that was not of his preferred style i.e. a fruit forward wine. A wine which did not align with his style preference was, more or less, categorized as a faulty or inadequate wine with no future. To achieve a high score it was not enough that a wine was full of finesse and elegance, clean and merely adequately ripe with a subtle but long finish. It had to be in the fully loaded fruit style he liked. Powerful wines resulting from high levels of extraction. Anything else lacked concentration. It was as if Parker’s assessment of a wine’s quality was limited to how the wine presented itself on the nose and the front palate only, without regard for the more subtle retro-olfactory sensations which are so important in evaluating the quality of every wine but especially, perhaps, a wine which does not lead with a lot of upfront fruit. A subtlety fruited wine can have a lot of persistence. Power and fruit concentration give a strong and lasting presence on the front palate, but this is not the same as strong retro-olfactory presence on the back palate.  The inability to separate style preference from intrinsic quality assessment is in my view a fundamental flaw in any wine critic - as I have written elsewhere.   

And that is why it is so bizarre that Ms Perrotti-Brown would relate an occasion in Tokyo in 2004 when Parker told her a Tyrell No 1 Semillion, selected by Ms Perrotti-Brown for inclusion at a tasting he was to moderate, was not in a style he liked “but that he understood why I and others might like it”.  But Parker then invited her to join him on the podium in presenting the wine, surely reflecting his inability himself on the podium to be enthusiastic about the quality of a wine not to his taste. The problem is that his published notes as I recall and, in particular, his scores, did not share the facility she asserts him as having to acknowledge the quality of wines he did not like.   

No doubt the nascent wine drinking public wanted wines with fewer faults. And Parker is to be credited with contributing to reducing the instance of these - and for calling out a few estates who really were resting on past reputation. But that is not the same as saying the consumer should only want wines in the Parker preferred rich and extracted style and that only these wines should score highly. In only scoring these wines highly - and having the wide influence he had acquired - Parker did the market considerable disservice.

I stopped subscribing to the Wine Advocate in about 1996.  And apparently Parker is a decent guy. But I know I love my 1993 red burgundies - believe many of them to be wines of objective merit - and will forever defend the memories of Gerard Potel and Hubert de Montille against unjustified criticism from a person who cannot distinguish what he likes from what is good.