I was struck by the amount of criticism Robert Parker
receives from many in the wine industry, particularly given his popularity
among readers. While the complaints about Parker pushing his own tastes on the
wine industry are apt, I wonder if there isn’t something else behind the
complaints. Wineries and Parker stand in something of an adversarial
relationship—he is, after all, a critic. If a lot of consumers like Robert
Parker and many wineries don’t, maybe part of the reason is that Robert Parker advocates
for consumers against the wine industry. Admittedly, this is a pretty stark
departure from the typical characterization of Parker as the dean of the wine
establishment.
But there’s some evidence to support this idea. First of
all, Parker himself cites
famous consumer activist Ralph Nader as one of his inspirations for
becoming a wine critic in the first place. And Parker claims that Nader’s
philosophy of objectivity informs the standards that The Wine Advocate uses to rate wines (although Parker holds other
contributors to his publication to somewhat lower standards).
This point of view is apparent in Parker’s reviews as well.
A rhetorical
analysis of Parker’s writings described The
Wine Advocate’s tone as a “manifesto of ardent consumer activism.”
Anecdotally, that seems to be what the consumers in Escaping Robert Parker sought his advice out for as well. They don’t
want to be “taken advantage of,” and they trust Parker to protect them from
wineries looking to do just that.
If Parker were really helping consumers to pick out the
wheat from the chaff, we would expect a relatively weak relationship between
price and his ratings. If Parker’s reviews were predictable based on the price
of the wine, they would provide little value to the consumer looking for deals.
And quantitative
analysis found a correlation of only 0.3 between price and review score,
which is relatively low especially given wine’s role as a status good.
Good points, though I think this is also a familiar dynamic from any high-end artistic-oriented market. I'll comment more fully in my own post but I think people in the inner circle of this sort of world have inflated notions of what prestige means.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this, Mike. I do think, to Parker's credit, that he successfully elevated the role of the wine critic in the consumer market. In doing so, in some ways he went against the grain and worked to democratize wine for the consumers. One article from the Atlantic states, "But now comes this Parker, a man as naive as America, with his raw talent, his disproportionate weight, and his stubborn disregard for the hierarchy of taste." (Link to the article here: theatln.tc/1pjzqD1)
ReplyDeleteI think that because of his prominence, and because he was so highly regarded when no other wine critics were, Parker started with a disregard for hierarchy in the early years but then proceeded to actually create his own hierarchy within the world of wine as he became revered. Whether or not this was his true intention is unclear - nevertheless, I think he deserves credit for bringing critical analysis to the wine industry and for trying to increase the exchange of information and educate consumers about wine.
And his impact has not been all bad. For some small, family-run wineries, they are grateful to have received Parker's acclaim because it put them on the map and allowed them to continue producing when they otherwise would have struggled financially. For other wineries, however, their view is that his (biased) palate has created biased impressions that have shaped consumer purchasing and have homogenized the wine industry on an international scale.
I thought it was interesting that Alder Yarrow explained during our class discussion that he tries not to review wines that he knows he has his own strong bias against (or that if he does review these wines, he tries to be as objective as he can about it). I think that, in theory, every varietal should be able to achieve a high score - but it is difficult to achieve complete objectivity in the analysis of different varietals. I also agree with Yarrow that, once the wine rating reaches a certain level, the differences which distinguish a 97-point wine from a 99-point wine are not truly reflective of a difference in quality but are more reflective of the subtleties of personal taste. It is remarkable how prices escalate quite significantly even in this narrow, high-point range - and I think this is mostly a testament to consumers' attachment to numbers as a pure reflection of quality. I liked Yarrow's approach, which is not to make such subtle distinctions between wines that are of such excellent quality. Maybe the narrowing of the rating scale, in the long run, would be a good thing (i.e. taking out the difference between 98-99-100 points).