The Parker/Roland dilemma is one of my favorite things about wine. The argument goes that these two are making the whole wine world move in a boring direction. I think this is absolutely true, but I think it is our fault, not theirs. We are the consumers. We drive the market. And we are the fools encouraging their two philosophies to destroy nuance and poetry in the wine world.
Robert Parker was raised on Coca-Cola and sees wine as a beverage rather than a component of a meal. I love when people discuss his exceptional palate. In my view, and I may be wrong, an exceptional palate would be one very skilled at seeking out variety and subtlety in myriad things. Parker doesn't do this. Parker has never pretended to do this. Parker simply declares, "this is the kind of thing I like," and "I like it a little," "I like it a little more," or "I like it a lot." Long gone are the days when Bob didn't like a wine.
Parker likes the wines a kid raised on Coca-cola would love. There is no subtlety in a Parker wine. His wines are in your face, they are huge, they are fruit bombs, with alcohol and lazy tannins filling your mouth. They vary very little. In Bob's world, the difference between a Cabernet Sauvignon from France and one from California should not be much more than the difference between a Pepsi and a Coke (definitely a little different and one definitely goes better with pizza, while the other pairs better with cheeseburgers, but both are constant and dependable). That's all. That is definitely a type of wine, it's the one Parker likes, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Michael Roland has figured out how to make all wines taste pleasing to Parker. Roland knows that if you let the fruit ripen longer, the tannins will soften and the sugar will concentrate, and if you expose the resulting juice to an enormous amount of oxygen, very quickly, and then slam it into new oak, any edges will be rounded, hastening the results that used to require patience, and foresight, and perfect weather. In Michael Roland's world there are no bad vintages and there is no need to wait. Pull the pop tab on your wine and drink up, there will be more exactly like it next year.
Consequently, when someone hires Michael to consult on his or her wine and make it a huge powerhouse of boozy extraction, Robert Parker loves it and gives it a very high rating. This makes total sense to me. The problems occur following this process. Once Parker rates it, the price runs up because people demand wines of his considered caliber.
At this point, there are a lot of people in the world who were raised on Coca-Cola. Add to this that learning wine is a slow, life-long process that many people find threatening and awkward, that the biggest conspicuous consumers in our culture are too young to have had the experience necessary to develop a personal view of wine perfection, and that Parker's system of elementary grading is user-friendly and easy to follow, and it's no wonder his influence is so great. Also remember, sometimes Coke just tastes good. As a matter of fact, when drinking wine as a cocktail, which many consumers do, these wines are very good at standing alone. The result is that people the world over now lean on Parker to pick their wines for them.
The problem is the market, and that we seem to expect a wine Parker has given a great score to cost a ridiculous amount of money. Why? When Parker started, there were only a handful of wines pleasing to the Parker Palate, and they were some of the most expensive wines in the world. Somehow, as wines without the pedigree and proven tradition of these higher-caliber wines started tasting somewhat like them we started paying up for them, without realizing that they needn't cost as much. More wines of a type equals more supply, more supply should mean lower prices.
There is now a larger supply of wines in the world that follow Parker's preferences. Granted, winemakers play down this fact by labeling the same wine as different, but we as wine lovers should be savvy enough to see through this. Accepting that all Parker-style wines are similar to one another, just buy the cheapest 96 pointer every time if that's what you want and don't pay up, then all the other 96s will have to come into a sensible line.
Winemakers are doing exactly what they should do; the disenfranchised wine lovers aren't. Winemakers are simply charging as much as the market will afford for their product. It is simple supply and demand, and it makes perfect sense. People in business should be doing all they can to make money. However, the market can resist the Parker Effect by simply not letting makers skew their prices just because he has given their wine a good rating. Make them first prove over hundreds of years that this style of wine has longevity and will appreciate in both value and profile. We can also push the market away from Parker's influence by seeking out a variety of wines and rewarding uniqueness.
In my lifetime, I have been lucky enough to try some of the great Bordeaux. I can actually tell you that, having tasted the '45 Mouton out of both jeroboam and magnum this year, the jeroboam is fantastic and drinking perfectly and that the magnum, although interesting, has lost some of its depth and is primarily showing a very interesting note of spearmint. As a result, I suspect the bottles have started their decline and that if you own some you should drink them now (if you do, and want company, shoot me an email.) I have also tasted about 20 vintages of Latour this year and I can definitely tell you that the ones made from the early 90's on taste like a genius representation of generic, big, hedonistic wine and not distinctly like Latour anymore.
My fear is that, by forcing oxygen exposure in order to make wines drink better in the short run, their death will be hastened and the arc of their prime will be curtailed. Is Michael Roland being shortsighted in his recommendations, as I suspect? Only time will tell. If so, the '00 Moutons will have been a huge waste of money in the $500 dollar range, as soon as 2015. People being born now will be paying ridiculous prices for the more traditional wines being produced today by people more concerned with actual terroir representation then pleasing the Pepsi Generation, and everyone will have rushed through this generation of wine realizing that, without significant acid and tannin structure to balance the extracted fruit and alcohol, all these wines do over time is flatten.
Lets face it: Bob and Michael have nothing to lose. They both turn 60 in '07 so why would they want wine to only hit its perfect stride in sixty years? They very much benefit from winemakers ignoring tradition and forcing wines to cut their noses off to spite their faces, playing up immediacy at the cost of promise.
The reality is wine is a market, and only people paying for authenticity will stem this tide. So, if you hate they way things are going, stop bemoaning the lemming-like tendencies of Parker-ites and go seek out real wine and buy it. Stop bitching about Bob and Mike -- in this shortsighted, immediate gratification world only a very few people would turn their backs on an opportunity to make the whole world taste like they think it should. Be honest, would you be one of them?
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