In DECANTER’s August issue, under their “Good Month…Bad Month…” section at the front of the magazine, there appeared the following “newslet”:

Bobhuggers

Maryland luminary Robert Parker’s wine notes are to be printed on the backs of U.S. Airways seats, revealed when the tray table is deployed, causing the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE to muse on the ‘omnipresence’ of the the ‘wine god’.

Now let me immediately state that this is NOT another attack, veiled or otherwise, on Robert Parker, and the phenomenon that has grown up around his criticism. Now while my tastes more often than not clash with Mssr. Parker’s, I freely admit that he has done great things in shining the flashlight into the dusty corners of the wine world, and further, to bring every day wine drinking and wine appreciation to “the people”. And this is, after all, the good old USA - a place exhalts both the self made man, and the celebrity, when there is a coincidence of the two, a certain segment of the citizenry just falls all over itself to follow the leader, but, like the old saying goes “Hey, it’s a free country”. More power to HIM. Robert Parker has built HIMSELF a little empire, but he’s had more than a little help from us…

No, it’s not Robert Parker that I have a problem with, but rather the sycophants who sniff his chair like it was their jobs, and this development with US Air DEFINITELY doesn’t help matters…In the end, if you want to be an optimist, this development is the simple case of siding with a winner. If you’re a bit more circumspect, it’s pandering to the least common denominator, or even just “piling on”. But again, whatever you call it, who can blame anybody for striking such a deal? No, in the end, it’s our job, YOUR job to resist the seemingly irresistable avalanche of homogenization.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recommended wines to folks in the shop, and after walking away, and casually glancing back in the customer’s direction, have caught them surreptitiously sliding out a copy of THE WINE ADVOCATE to see if they could find my pick amongst Bob’s. If you trust Mr. Parker more than you trust me, I don’t blame you, but then why ask me in the first place? Maybe this is a bit of paranoia on my part, but it FEELS like the customer is checking the official “answer sheet” to see if you’ve misled them or not. THIS is the problem, i.e. the notion that there is actual, “right” and “wrong” in wine, and worse, that there is only one man who knows just which is which…

Once again, I don’t mean to impugn Mr. Parker’s accomplishments in any manner, but I simply cannot understand why anyone would kowtow to anyone else’s OPINIONS about something so readily and completely. Americans are often nearly pathologically independent and contrary with almost everything else in their lives, so why do so many of us just roll over and accept the OPINIONS of one man as Gospel? I really don’t get it. Putting Mr. Parker’s opinions on wine on airline seatbacks only serves to further the notion that Mr. Parker is not only the greatest wine critic of all time, but that he also DESERVES to be…no one else could even get whiff of such a deal, so he MUST be “the best”, right? To me, those that hang on Parker’s every word are nearly exactly analogous to “bandwagon” sports fans, i.e. those that believe that if they side with a winner, it will grant them immediate credibility and status. In my eyes, however, all it makes you is a lemming.

And there are surely those out there that say “So what that Parker’s got the wine world on a string, he’s just one guy.” And my retort would be that he is indeed just one man, but a man with the sort of power in his field that Ruppert Murdoch has in mainstream media - grossly disproportionate. And even THIS might be fine if this disproportionality weren’t eventually driving the kinds of wine that winemakers are actually turning out onto the market. More than one winemaker has admitted, off the record of course, that he makes a special barrel for Robert Parker that is deliberately dialed in for Parker’s palate, and that is substantially different from the rest of the production of the “same” wine. When “one man” elicits this sort of response from the world’s finest winemakers, some of whom are working out of literally hundreds of years of tradition, you know that things gone bass ackwards.

Here’s my prescription: read Parker, but ALSO read Steven Tanzer, and WINE SPECTATOR, and FOOD & WINE and THE WINE NEWS and THE WINE QUARTERLY and DECANTER. Learn and compare what one publication values versus another, but MOST importantly, compare their values with YOUR OWN. Parker is indeed a major force in the wine world, but it is only the blind followers of his every word that allows him to, albeit figuratively, to reach right down into vineyards worldwide to determine, at least in part, what grapes get planted, how they are cultivated, and how they are handled in the cellar, and to my mind, that is EVERYONE’S loss. So the next time you feel Parker’s hand guiding yours to this or that bottle, smack it away. Take the advice of your favorite shop’s consultants. Take the advice of another publication or pundit. Take the advice of a friend, family member or colleague. Cast dice. Flip a coin. Eeenie meenie miney mo, just be a LEADER or at least a dissenter and resist the opinions of the man whose reputation was made by the herd.

TOM CIOCCO