Tag Archives: wine writing

Robert Parker and the Vintners Hall of Fame

The news this week that Robert Parker was not elected to the Vintners Hall of Fame was not surprising. Too many of us who write about wine hold a grudge the way Scrooge McDuck holds onto his cash — and we’re just as silly about it. Or, as wine guru Doug Frost, who voted for Parker, said: “I’m sure jealously had something to do with it. It has been fun and easy to bash Parker for years.”

Parker invented the 100-point scoring system, which gives every wine a score from 1 to 100, with the higher the score the better. As such, he is the most important person in the wine business, and may well be the most important person in the history of the wine business. The 100-point system, for better or worse, has changed changed the way the wine world works. It has been copied by almost every influential wine critic and publication in one form or another, and retailers use it to sell cases and cases and cases of wine (often without regard to quality). Perhaps most importantly, winemakers not only covet a Parker score, but make their wines in a style that Parker likes so they can get a Parker score, a process that’s called “Parker-izing” them.

In this, keeping Parker out of the Vintners Hall is like keeping Babe Ruth out of the baseball Hall of Fame because you don’t like home runs. But Parker’s not in. Why this happened and what it says about the wine business after the jump:

Continue reading →

A few more words about wine availability

A regular visitor to the blog sent me an email this week, the gist of which was “I have trouble finding the wines you write about.”

Sigh.

As previously noted, the bane of the Wine Curmudgeon ?s existence is availability. In fact, it’s the bane of almost every wine writer’s existence, and I’ve even had winery officials tell me that it drives them crazy, too.

It’s always difficult, unless you’re writing for readers in one small part of one city, to negotiate the availability maze. Given my audience these days, which takes in people from around the world, it’s that much more difficult. All anyone can do, and what I try to do, is to write about wines that are “generally available,” and to note when wines have limited availability. Unfortunately, the term “generally available” seems to mean less and less these days. (Why that is — the recession, consolidation among producers, the vagaries of the three-tier system — is a subject for another day.)

I always ask, when I like a wine, if it has general U.S. distribution. If it doesn’t, I usually don’t write about it. In this sense, I am at the mercy of the winery, importer or distributor. That’s why I always link to the winery, importer, or distributor Web sites in the review. If you can’t find it locally, send the company in the link an email and ask them if there is a local distributor. If there is, you should be able to get a retailer in your area to order it for you.