The full text of my review is available for free (PDF; begins on p. 209). I also encourage you to subscribe to the JWE to get the full text of all other JWE articles.

Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

…Even if the exaggerated style of winemaking championed by the critic Robert M. Parker, Jr., has fallen out of fashion amongst wine geeks these days, there are a hundred legacies that will endure for generations beyond the particulars of the man’s palate: his points.

Robert Parker was not the first wine critic to employ a 100-point scale, but it was he that etched the paradigm of attaching numbers to wine into the collective consciousness of the gustatory media. Parker’s leading competitors in America—Stephen Tanzer, Wine Spectator, Wine & Spirits, Wine Enthusiast—all currently use 100-point rating scales. Even the divergent foreign competition now gravitates toward other functionally numerical forms of secondary-school-test-mark mimicry: letter grades from A to F, points out of 10 or 20, glasses out of three, stars out of five.

If attaching numbers to wine turns out to be Parker’s main legacy, it’s a major one. A few decades ago, the wine writer’s primary role was merely to describe wines. But the purpose of the wine writer after Parker is to quantify their quality. The few prominent modern wine critics whose reviews don’t revolve around numerical ratings are in the minority, and they tend to be interpreted by some observers as an anti-Parker faction—even when they have no intention to be. You know that a framework has become canonical when anything in the field that doesn’t adopt it is understood as an attempt to refute it.

Canonization can have a stifling effect on the developing talent in the enterprise of writing. The literary scholar Harold Bloom has suggested that the canon can be a paralyzing force in the lives of up-and-coming poets, who struggle with the task of differentiating themselves from the same voices that inspired them to pursue poetry. Read too much, in other words, and you might convince yourself that there’s nothing new to write. The novelist Benjamin Kunkel, asked by London’s Observer whether he was influenced by the more famous novelist Dave Eggers, expressed that tension in a way that will be familiar to many writers: “Everyone I know has read him, but I don’t read very much contemporary fiction. I wanted very much to create my own sound, and I didn’t want to feel that I was either running to meet him or deliberately running away from him.”

Not reading Eggers is a choice that any fiction writer can make. But not reading Parker is hardly an option for the modern wine writer: the shelves of most upmarket wine stores are strewn with past and present Wine Advocate shelf-talkers, which function like permanent retrospective installations of Parker’s work. So we have no choice but to engage, and in so doing, we often divide: into those who run to meet Parker, perhaps with deference to Jacques Chirac and decades’ worth of popular wisdom from industry veterans; and the increasing numbers that run away from him, perhaps with complaints of global convergence on a big, oaky, high-alcohol style of winemaking, the marginalization of terroir, and maybe just a tinge of jealousy toward the man who made millions tasting wine.

If contemporary critics are split on the merits of Parker’s exaggerated palate, though, their revealed behavior of replication shows there to be supermajority support for his points methodology. Parker points were first imagined, in the spirit of Ralph Nader, as the guerilla ammunition for the consumers camping out in the vineyards, their last line of defense against wine bullshit. The funny thing is that the vision of independence from producers that originally inspired Wine Advocate seems to have been completely lost on the modern copycat magazines, many of which display full-page ads from the same producers whose wines are rated. Some even solicit application fees to be considered for wine awards. (Ashenfelter et al., 2010). Decanter, for instance, charges up to £103.70 or US$156 per bottle.

Meanwhile, to his great credit, Parker has more or less maintained his independence. He still doesn’t accept ads from wineries, and he still makes his money by selling subscriptions and books. Although, inexplicably, he doesn’t always taste blind—and although he was recently embarrassed by a lavish junket bestowed by the Argentine wine industry lobby (later documented by wine writer Tyler Colman) upon his right-hand man, Jay Miller—Parker’s core principles appear to be almost as unique in the industry as they were when first introduced 30 years ago.

Why, then, has he left behind his points system in his newest book and first foray into the world of inexpensive wine authorship, Parker’s Wine Bargains, a 512-page tome whose mission is to reveal “the world’s best wine values under $25”?…

[skipping forward to later in the review...]

“Three-quarters of wine produced in Provence is rosé, so that chapter, written by David Schildknecht, might seem a natural place to start. But Provençal rosé is dismissed wholesale by Schildknecht as an “ocean of pink plonk,” whose “existence” is blamed largely on the “uncritical comportment” of the “tourists who flock there” (although the “natives” share some blame as well). As a result, only the “small upper echelon” of rosés is “interesting.” How ignorant, those vacationers on the seaside who gaze out at the waves and simply enjoy the refreshing local wine with their grilled seafood instead of complaining about how uninteresting it is!

Of the more than 1,000 French wines under $25 recommended in the book, just seven are rosés from Provence, and even these seem chosen for their un-rosé-like qualities: one displays a “white-wine-like personality”; one has “carnal undertones…impressively concentrated”; another is “meaty.” One wonders whether Schildknecht has sworn off bread and salad as “plonk,” too, and eats only boar and venison, even at the beach. It would behoove Parker to assign Provence to a critic who actually enjoys the region’s archetypal style: not “carnal” rosé, but rather crisp, thirst-quenching, rosé-like rosé, the savior of many a summer afternoon for the fishermen of Marseille, for the billionaires of Antibes, for the vacationing winemakers of Bordeaux and Burgundy. To everything, there is a season…

…[In the South Africa chapter,] Schildknecht surpasses [Mark] Squires’ chapter-long specific-adjective count in a single review, his fourth of the chapter, which describes Backsberg’s Klein Babylons Toren as having a “rich, polished, barrel-enhanced mélange of tobacco, sealing wax, plum, blackberry, humus, iodine, underbrush, and sweetly floral notes, all suggesting a Bordeaux wine that would cost at least three times its price.” Ah yes, that unmistakable sealing wax-underbrush-iodine profile of Bordeaux costing at least $63. Maybe that’s what those ignorant tourists in Provence should be yearning for.

By the end of Schildknecht’s eighth South Africa review—we’re still only on the second page of the chapter—he has also mentioned quince, wet wool, lime zest, mulberries, sage, fresh green beans, apple, nuts, lemon, rose hip, more flowers, saddle leather, licorice, “smoky black tea,” vanilla, “lightly cooked blackberry and blueberry,” mint (twice), tobacco (twice), black pepper, sap, “dried black currants,” tar, (just plain) tea, baking spices, black olives, acacia, peach, cress, and white pepper. Later in the chapter, he identifies such pomposities as “salted grapefruit,” grapefruit rind, winter pear, “restrained gooseberry,” milk chocolate, roasted red peppers, “smoky Latakia tobacco,” beef jerky, soy, baked apple, tangerine zest, “salt-tinged nuts and grains,” and “tomato foliage.”

If the small size, friendly cover, and omission of vintages and point scores in Parker’s Wine Bargains invites in a new audience of everyday wine drinkers, then adjectives like that cast them right back out again. This spotty but persistent out-of-touchness with the mainstream audience is the central tension of Parker’s Wine Bargains. Consider, for instance, how little attention is paid to dry sparkling wine, a category much sought out by American consumers, whether as a dinner-party apéritif or for one of the “special occasions” mentioned on the book’s back cover. The past few years have seen an explosion of widely available méthode traditionelle wines under $25 from Spain, California, and Washington State. Yet of the 3,000 bottles listed in Parker’ s Wine Bargains, only 19 (0.6%) are dry sparkling wines, of which only three are Spanish Cavas and none are American…

…[B]ut the biggest flaw in Parker’s Wine Bargains lies not in its poor organization or arbitrary adjectives, but rather in the fact that many of the wines reviewed in the book are unavailable in the marketplace. It’s not clear whether or not there’s a production or breadth-of-distribution minimum for inclusion—none is mentioned in the introduction—but a good portion of the recommendations turn out to be practically useless, even to the savviest of Internet-ordering readers. Take, for instance, the listing of Veldenzer Grafschafter-Sonnenberg feinherb, a Riesling from a Mosel producer named Günther Steinmetz. If this wine is currently available for sale at any store in the United States, this reader, at least, was unable to locate it after an exhaustive search, which included a lot of time on Google and an inquiry with Mosel Wine Merchant, Steinmetz’s importer, who told me that 2007 was its last imported vintage, of which only 21 cases were distributed, all of them in Oregon and Washington State.

Some of the 100-point cult wines in Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide No. 7 may be famously elusive, but if wines recommended in Parker’s Wine Bargains, whose stated mission is to recommend bargain wines for “everyday drinking,” are impossible to find, even in America’s largest cities, it brings the book’s central function into question. What is Parker’s purpose, exactly?

Certainly his longstanding success does not derive from his ability to catalog the current inventory of your local supermarket, nor does it derive his ability to pick out blackberry or tobacco from a wine’s bouquet. It does not derive from the consistency of his observations, from his stated purpose of sorting out the good wine from the bad, or from any other of kind consumer advocacy. It comes, rather, from Parker’s talent for escapism, from his confident use of superlatives to capture the sensory imagination.

For most readers, flipping through an issue of Wine Advocate and reading about 100-point wines is like flipping through an issue of Motor Trend and looking at pictures of a Lamborghini: it’s an act somewhere between aspiration and entertainment. You’re not really considering whether the Diablo’s 5992 cc of displacement would be sufficient to get you where you’re going quickly and comfortably. You’re not even looking to buy a car. You’re reading the magazine because imagining yourself behind the wheel of a Lamborghini recreates the seventh-grade psyche of perfect possibility that is still buried somewhere in your weary folds of cortical memory.

Teenagers feel immortal, people always say. They think the finish really lasts forever.

It is the mix of idolatry and attainability that make Parker’s prose so compelling: these wines that win 100 points are described as Platonic forms, yet they’re also physical objects with real molecular structures; they’re liquids that can, at least in theory, come into contact with your mouth. Your local wine store doesn’t have the object of worship, and you couldn’t afford it anyway, but that’s hardly the point. It’s the ontology that matters: the idea that some wines really do win 100, that it is concretely possible to taste perfection, is irresistible. The very thing that invalidates Parker’s writing as nonfiction is what redeems it as fiction: his topic isn’t wine. It’s human contact with the divine.

Many of the people within the wine world that have become increasingly disgusted with so-called “Parkerization”—the tinkering with a style of winemaking to bring out more fruit, more oak, and more alcohol in hopes of improving a Parker score—would paint the celebrated critic as a power-hungry dictator with designs on reshaping the wine world just to please his palate and fortify his wealth. But to adopt that view is to misunderstand the fundamental human mechanics of Parker’s vast appeal. Winemakers may feel obliged to please him, but consumers are under no obligation to follow him. If you want to understand
Parker, look in the mirror.

Robert Parker is no dictator. He is a storyteller. The magnetism of his prose is that of J.K. Rowling’s, too: you’re first presented with a set of familiar facts and situations, and then, slowly, you’re seduced into suspending reason and believing in the perfectly impossible. Escape into a Parker review, and for a few sentences, there you are, back in junior high, the great critic’s palate—and yours, too—cured of its nagging mortality. In this counterfactual place, there is no perceptual bias, just perception. There is no confidence interval, just confidence. Parker’s 100-point wine is Gatsby’s green light, the orgiastic ghost of taste’s future, the tongue a sudden lattice of infinite resolution, the nose a sudden instrument of preternatural whiff.

Take away the Parker points—a slight disturbance that might at some point have seemed merely cosmetic to the book’s editors, like a font change—and that alternate reality suddenly slips away, like the memory of a dream in the seconds after you awaken. All that’s left in the sober morning light is an iterating network of fruit-adjective configurations in black and red type violating 512 sheets of white paper.

It’s not easy to be a wine writer after Parker. This fact, even Parker must face.

And in the index, there are two successive entries for the winery: “Casa Lapostolle (Argentina), 14; Casa Lapostolle (Chile), 84.”

I figured this was just an editing/database mistake. It happens.

But things got stranger when I actually compared the reviews of the exact same wines in the two chapters. Aside from the words “black currant” and “black fruits,” their descriptions turned out to be totally different from each other. Here they are:

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. This Merlot has an attractive nose of black currant, blueberry, vanilla, and clove. The wine has good weight on the palate with layers of black fruits and a firm structure. Drink it during its first 6 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Merlot Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandra [sic] has aromas of cedar, spice box, black cherry, and black currant followed by a smooth-textured, ripe Merlot with ample savory black fruits, good depth, and a moderately long finish.”

Blueberry, vanilla, and clove have been replaced by cedar, spice box, and black cherry. Is there a wine-adjective dartboard in the house?

Moving on to the second double…

(From Argentina chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Cuvée Alexandre Apalta Vineyard. Similarly styled but with the focus on black currants. It has enough structure to evolve for 2–3 years in the bottle and will drink well during its first 8 years of life.”

(From Chile chapter) “Casa Lapostolle Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre. The Cabernet Sauvignon Apalta Vineyard Cuvée Alexandre has an expressive bouquet of smoke, pencil lead, spice box, black cherry, and black currant. The wine’s black fruit flavors linger into a medium-long finish.”

At least the black currants travel well.

Mistakes like this do happen. They don’t discredit the critics behind them; we all have slightly different experiences when we taste the same wine twice. And in this case, although the tasting notes are totally different, they’re not quite mutually exclusive, nor do they render dramatically divergent judgments/opinions about the wine (Parker ratings are not included in the under-$25 book). But I see it as yet another reminder of the arbitrariness of these fruit/spice adjectives, even in the hands of the world’s highest-end wine critics—which is particularly troubling when these opinions turn out to be so powerful in the marketplace.

Ethics scandals are politico porn. They’re also fertile ground for undeserved scapegoating. But there’s one category in which, across the board, there’s not nearly enough public stoning going on: the world of information intermediaries. On the government side, that means regulatory agencies; in the private sector, it’s the critics, the expert witnesses in capitalism’s de facto justice system.

Information intermediaries, we’re to understand, are society’s check against puffery. They make careers of trustworthiness and accountability. In society’s service, they apply rigor to the claims of corporations and analyze their standards. For this hard work, they’re rewarded by the marketplace and by the United States—sometimes handsomely, sometimes not.

Two bits of recent news bring about two otherwise disparate intermediaries, both preeminent in their niches—Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the publication whose critical appraisals are one of the central determinants of a wine’s success or failure on the marketplace, and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency whose critical appraisals are the primary safety check against America’s airlines—systematically abusing that authority.

Jay Miller: Disfrutando?

Parker’s is one of the few wine publications that don’t accept advertising, for which he deserves praise. And it’s certainly acceptable to take free samples of wine from producers—that’s often the only way to taste new releases before they’ve gone to market. But the recent transgressions of Jay Miller, Robert Parker’s right-hand man, are spectacular indeed. In another classic case of the traditional print media jumping on the bandwagon of a topic that had been exposed quite a bit earlier by an incisive blogger—in this case, Tyler Colman, who goes by “Dr. Vino”—Miller’s series of all-expenses-paid vacation/junkets, financed by wine producers, have finally been reported by the mainstream media in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Some of rumors about Miller’s behavior in Argentina go quite a bit further in scandalousness than the mere acceptance of free hotels, food, and drinks. But what’s crystal clear, as reported in the Journal and, previously, by Colman—and admitted by Parker—is that the writers of Parker’s Wine Advocate accept lavish free meals from, and are flown around on weeks-long junkets by, the same wine producers whose wines they’re supposed to be critically reviewing—in Argentina and elsewhere.

Parker doesn’t just present himself as a wine writer, and he doesn’t just present Wine Advocate as a wine magazine. No, these are “consumer advocates”: in Parker’s new statement of ethical standards, which was published on eRobertParker.com after the scandal broke, he writes: “I…remain today…significantly influenced by the independent philosophy of consumer advocate Ralph Nader.” Mr. Miller’s only job is to independently criticize wines and assign numerical ratings to those wines in service to, and he is engaged in the systematic, ongoing practice of being taken on vacation by those wines’ producers.

Miller has apologized, and Parker has tried to explain himself, but Parker’s actions (or lack thereof) speak more loudly than his rambling statements on bulletin boards. If it’s even true that Parker didn’t know about Miller’s junkets beforehand (which is extremely unlikely), the fact that Parker didn’t fire Miller when he found out is a loud, clear statement that what he did really wasn’t that bad. In fact, it’s endorsed even in the new code of ethical standards. Incredibly, rather than rejecting Miller’s trips, that statement specifically renders them acceptable:

I…expect [the Wine Advocate critics], as I have done for 30+ years, not to solicit or accept free hotel accommodations or hospitality not directly related to their professional endeavors.

Not directly related to their professional endeavors? Of course a free tasting junket would be related to their professional endeavors. That’s exactly the problem!

Parker finishes his exhausting essay with a poetic flourish: “Wine is, in the final analysis, a beverage of pleasure, and intelligent wine criticism should be a blend of both hedonistic and analytical schools of thought—to the exclusion of neither.” At least the record shows that he’s got the hedonistic part down, anyway.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that over at the F.A.A., the airlines being rigorously scrutinized for adherence to strict safety standards—again, the organization’s primary responsibility—are referred to within the agency as “customers”:

In 2008, two F.A.A. inspectors assigned to Southwest Airlines testified before Congress that their managers had let Southwest fly its Boeing 737s without inspections for cracks that the safety agency required. Office managers referred to the airline as the regulatory agency’s “customer.” Top F.A.A. officials eventually conceded that the inspectors were right and the middle managers were wrong.

The Times’ investigative report tells the chilling story of an inspector named Christopher Monteleon, who voiced serious concerns about the incompetence and low safety standards of the pilots of Colgan Air a year before one of the airline’s Bombardier Dash 8-400 turboprop planes crashed in Buffalo, apparently due to pilot error. Apparently, Monteleon’s warnings were not just ignored but actually punished by his superiors:

Three times, he said, the pilots flew the airplane faster than the manufacturer’s specifications allowed, but they initially refused to report this and have the plane inspected for damage…[T]hey tried three approaches to the airport in Charleston, W. Va., and “botched” all of them, failing to get the plane at an appropriate altitude, on the right path and at the right speed for landing. “They got confused,” Mr. Monteleon said…But when he reported problems to his F.A.A. superiors, he was suspended from important portions of his job overseeing Colgan’s acquisition of the Dash 8 and given a desk job, he said…Colgan crews were flying fatigued, Mr. Monteleon said, and were not fully focused on the tasks in front of them, two factors apparently in play in the Buffalo crash. All 49 people on board the flight, which took off from Newark, were killed, along with one man on the ground. Mr. Monteleon said his supervisors were too “cozy” with Colgan, and eager to help it keep its schedule…In one memo retained by Mr. Monteleon, his manager indicates that he was reassigned because of his “conduct during a work-related duty” and because “the matter also required management to immediately respond to the operator’s scheduling needs.” The operator was Colgan.

In aviation, as in wine, our intermediaries have failed in their duty to their real customers: the readers, the consumers, the citizens. And unlike what happens when ethics scandals directly involve politicians, neither Robert Parker nor the F.A.A. is likely to be voted out of power anytime soon.