PARKTON, Md.
In his new blog, Eric Asimov reports on the pleasure, culture and business of wine, beer and spirits.
ON TOP Robert M. Parker Jr. in Maryland.
IT has been a difficult couple of years for Robert M. Parker Jr., the wine writer who has famously been labeled the most influential critic of any kind in the world. Though Mr. Parker has gotten used to living with a big fat target painted on his back, the most recent series of attacks was especially galling to him.
A debate over the 2003 vintage of Château Pavie in St. Émilion got personal in 2004, with Mr. Parker, who lives in this rural Maryland town about 25 miles north of Baltimore, pitted against some of Britain's leading wine writers. Mr. Parker praised the wine as "a brilliant effort," but Jancis Robinson called it a "ridiculous wine," and Clive Coates wrote, "Anyone who thinks this is good wine needs a brain and palate transplant!"
Jonathan Nossiter's documentary "Mondovino," released in the United States in 2005, juxtaposed Mr. Parker with a Burger King sign and portrayed him as an emblem of opulent globalized wine and an enemy of diversity, terroir and nuance. A 2005 biography, "The Emperor of Wine" by Elin McCoy (Ecco), expressed concern about a world dominated by "the tyranny of one palate."
On top of this came the less-than-subtle slap from Hugh Johnson, the venerable British wine writer, who in his recent memoir wrote, "Imperial hegemony lives in Washington and the dictator of taste in Baltimore."
Then, early this year, came two events that were far more traumatic for him. On Jan. 8, during a tasting trip in Bordeaux, he received a call from his 18-year-old daughter, Maia.
"She said: 'Dad, don't worry, but Mom's in the hospital, and she won't be able to join you in Paris in a couple of days,' " Mr. Parker recalled in a conversation at his home here, on a grassy five acres adjacent to a state park. In fact, his wife, Pat, had nearly died falling down the steps at home, breaking two vertebrae in her neck and sustaining a concussion; she required 20 stitches to the head.
After being reassured that Pat was stable and did not require his immediate attention, he decided to finish his trip before returning home. The next day, as he was driving away from Château Angélus in St. Émilion, another car ran a stop sign and totaled his rented Volvo, leaving him unscratched but badly shaken.
Who could blame Mr. Parker for wanting to slow down to contemplate life, perhaps while lingering over a few bottles from his cellar, rather than keeping up the marathon tasting of 10,000 wines a year for The Wine Advocate, his periodical? But though he's now 58 and dealing with some nagging infirmities, like spinal stenosis, a painful narrowing of the spinal canal, it's not Mr. Parker's way to step back from adversity.
Frankly, he is tired of being the pincushion for every moke who wants to take a jab at the state of the wine business today. While Mr. Parker is too good-natured and enthusiastic to be mad as hell, he certainly does not want to take it anymore. He wonders why other American publications, like Wine Spectator, published by Marvin R. Shanken, and Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar, don't come in for their fair share of abuse.
"When somebody wants to write an article attacking a scoring system or the influence of wine writers, who's right in the cross hairs?" he asked, sitting at his desk in his supremely messy home office, where a hodgepodge of bottles, CD's, periodicals and files seem to cover every available surface. "It's not Steve Tanzer, it's not Marvin Shanken, it's me. These other people, it's not like they don't have some influence, and I'm more than happy to share it."
Mr. Parker has stood at the top of the wine-writing heap for almost a quarter of a century now, since he was the first and loudest in declaring the 1982 Bordeaux vintage to be stunning and wonderful. When he urged consumers to buy the wines, they responded, and winemakers all over the world noticed.
FROM a little guy taking on the entrenched powers in the wine world, he became the most powerful force himself. Now, perhaps, he is entering a third phase in which he is focusing his writing on those areas that interest him the most — Bordeaux, the Rhone, California and Australia. And with a body of work approaching three decades, he is interested in his legacy, in correcting what he feels are misimpressions about his tastes and his intentions.
