Transcript:
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Hello and welcome to your new Bonner Private Wines video, where we learn together and explore the wine world weekly. Today I'd like to discuss with you whether or not Robert Parker really influenced the world of wine as much as people would say. And how if you followed a little bit the history of modern wine and winemaking, you know that Robert Parker has unquestionably being the most famous and arguably the most influential wine critic of all times.
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For 30 years, from the 1980s all the way up to the late 20 tens. His palate alone, the scores he gave to certain wines, were followed by wine buyers en masse, to the point that Parker was accused of actually pushing wineries all around the world to produce ever bigger and ever oakier wines in a phenomenon that was called the Parkerization of wine.
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The question I'd like to answer today is: “Was this Parkerization and Robert Parker's impact on the wine world just a big lie?” I was a winemaker making wine around the world during that period, even trained under one of Parker's favorite star, global winemaker Michael Rolland, so I should know. Let's go.
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A few weeks ago, I made a video on this channel where I discussed the history and influence of Robert Parker. It's called The Rise and Fall of Robert Parker, and I highly recommend you watch it for more context and understanding of today's discussion. Researching that video, I came across a fascinating article written by Lisa Perotti-Brown, Master of Wine, called The Big Parkerization Lie and published on the Wine Advocate website itself.
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Lisa was the editor in chief of The Wine Advocate when Parker's started stepping down from the publication in 2008, and she fulfilled the top position for nearly 15 years until 2022. So she is one of the persons with the most firsthand experience working with Robert Parker. In this light, her insight, I find, is particularly interesting. I do advocate reading her article because it's difficult to fully summarize for me and contextualize every single point that she develops in the article.
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I'll link it in the video description, and we'll get to what really happened in the wine world as I witnessed it in a minute. But I want to give you some highlights of what she says, because her point of view is very fascinating and it's opposite what you normally read or hear elsewhere, which is quite unique. In essence, Perotti-Brown argues that the popularization of wine that led to wineries making riper, bigger styles of wines is a lie, as the title strongly suggests.
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Right? So that's the title. It's a lie, she says, that it's the taste of consumers buying those styles of wines that influenced a winery into picking grapes later, and imparting more oak and chasing bolder expressions that Parker only was there to reveal this trend, she says, quote, Parker is no more responsible for this consumer trend toward the vilified international style, as I am of the popularity of Dunkin Donuts in the 1980s.
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Because, yes, she used to eat some Dunkin Donuts in the 1980s. She interestingly explains that Parker was open minded and appreciative of other wine styles than the big, bold reds he’s famous for scoring super high, that, for example, he scored more white wines from Alsace in France—those crisp Riesling wines for example, above 95 points than he did wines from Bordeaux, California or the Rhone Valley.
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And it is a fair point indeed, she develops, talking about how the style of wine evolved over the 1980s, in the 90s, saying, quote, “Wineries throughout the world wanted a piece of the action and developed styles that fit the trend. But it was not Parker who created the trend: consumers did. Parker was the critic who validated consumers palates when very few other wine writers would, and helped his readers to find the best examples of the styles that they wanted to buy, drink, and sell.
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And Parker became extremely popular among consumers because of this.” End quote. Peretti Brown goes on saying that, quote, “The Parkerization myth is firmly ingrained in our wine history, regularly refreshed by one agenda or another. Why? There are several reasons why Parker's reason remained such an invisible, useful lie. For some. Number one, it provides a villain for causes.
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Number two, Parker provides winemakers with an excuse for why their wines didn't. Don't sell. Number three, it gives other writers critics something to write about that attracts more readers.” End quote. This is surely an interesting take on this subject, which I wanted to share with you, which truly makes me wonder and think about it. Think about also what really happened.
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If you're not totally of faith with what is the so-called Parkerization of wine and what happened through the 1980s, in the 90s and 2000s, well, essentially after the revelation of the 1982 vintage in Bordeaux as being exceptional by Robert Parker, he was the first to say it. Slowly but surely, wineries all around the world started shifting their approach to wine making to chase higher scores by Robert Parker as his influence on buying decisions grew and grew to become the dominant force in practice.
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And as I said, I was first a student at the Winemaking University of Bordeaux in the early 2000, the university where a lot of all the modern winemaking was invented or let's say perfected, including by the late winemaking guru Emile Peynaud, which is very famous, and that mentions in her article a few decades prior, Emile Peynaud was the pioneer in Bordeaux, so I trained there, and then I went on making wine in Bordeaux, in California, in Australia, in Italy, in Spain, all throughout the 2000.
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So I made, personally, “Parkerized” wines myself. What that consisted of, the “Michel Rolland recipe”, some may have called it for chasing top scores by Robert Parker, was to first push the maturity of the grapes, further harvesting later. So instead of picking grapes in late September or early October, as you normally do in certain areas like Bordeaux or Rioja in Spain, for example, where you leave those grapes on the vines for another additional 2 or 3 weeks more, you would lose a bit of juice from those grapes drying up outside, but the tannins would get a lot smoother.
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You'd get much more concentration as well. Riper fruit flavors, more alcohol too. So basically a bigger, fruitier, denser and smoother wine. Then, as a winemaker at the winery, you'd make sure you'd extract as much of these big tannins as possible because they're quite smooth. So you can go for them to get as big a wine as you could.
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And then you smoothen up those tannins using a lot of new oak barrels, which would also add not only a lot of sweet tasting vanilla and caramel flavors, but would also add a lot of soft oak tannins to surround all the grapes tannins. Then you get a big, smooth wine. Objectively, this is a really good way to make excellent wines that people love, and I used it myself.
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It's a little riskier and more expensive from the winery's perspective, but the wines are denser and would probably score a higher score rating at the time. The problem is that by doing this, you lose quite a lot of what makes a wine region unique. When the grapes are very ripe, overripe as we say, Cabernet Sauvignon from Bordeaux doesn't taste much different from a tempranillo in Spain, or even a Sangiovese in Tuscany or Merlot in California.
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They do taste a little different, but not really relative to those regions traditional style, especially when they all taste very oaky, caramelly, hazelnuts, etc. with the same exact oak flavors that are imparted into the wine using the same French oak barrels from all the same coopers all around the world. This is what was called the Parkerization of wine, a globalization and standardization of the style of wines that were produced, all fitting the same recipe and a similar end result.
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Regardless of who the producer is, who the winemaker is, or where it is produced, they will taste a bit the same. This is at least the theory, or perhaps the exaggerated interpretation of what happened.
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So at the end of the day, did the Parkerization of wine really happen, or was this all just a lie to blame and undermine the most influential wine critic on earth was the standardization of wine across the globe, just mainly driven by wine consumer desires, lies that sort of argues, especially American wine consumers and their taste favoring and buying bigger, oaky wines.
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Why Robert Parker was simply there to reveal what consumers wanted. Or was Parker, this evil villain driving an inferior thing? The whole world's preference in a Coca-Cola like approach? Well, if you ask me, it's honestly a bit of both. As is often the case, it's a bit of a chicken and egg kind of situation. And in fact, I'd argue that this is exactly what lies a parody brand says herself in her article.
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If you read the quote that I inserted earlier, quote, “People claim that the Parkerization must be real because Parker's high scores for some of the big, powerful, generously fruited wines produced in the 1980s and 90s into thousands created buying frenzies for those wines. And this is true. But what is also true? Wine consumers throughout that period loved drinking those wines.” end quote. Interesting.
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Well, Lisa explains it all herself here, doesn't she? She titled her article The Big Parkerization Lie and supports this theory with good arguments, but there are cracks in it. The truth is that, sure, the world started shifting towards bigger, more standardized wines, and it might have happened without Parker, but boy, did Bob rode that wave really well.
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And considering he was the most active and followed wine critic at the time, I'd say it's a little easy to say that he had nothing to do with it. Parker traveled consistently for years. He visited every top wine regions personally, many wineries and chateaux personally. He talked with producers, tasted their wines continuously, and he was giving them his opinion.
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It's really unreasonable to argue that this didn't impact the wine world or accelerated the phenomenon. He was there in very active. If you are a winemaker in a winery like I was, and the most famous and influential person on earth comes and tell you what he thinks about your wine. Of course you're going to listen and act accordingly.
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It's going to have an influence. Winemakers didn't come across Robert Parker and not being influenced by it, but just the wine consumer. That's that decision stands as a conclusion. Personally, I don't blame Robert Parker at all for accelerating the standardization of wine. I agree with Lisa that he is not the one responsible for it. He was just there and he led the pack to me.
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In this period when wine scored big is just a phase in the wine world history, a phase the wine world has to go through to learn like a child or a young adult has to go through phases in their life to find themselves and what they really, truly made of. Well, this standardization of wine helped wine with objectively make better wines for a while, wines that consumers could more easily appreciate it.
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And I'm really grateful to Parker for helping teach us winemakers that direction at the time. But now that the wine world has learned and digested this knowledge, wine regions producers are going back to their roots. They're rediscovering their terroir and how to make traditional style of wine. But they're reviving old, forgotten grapes, finding their own unique identity.
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Wines were perhaps a little too green and austere before Parker in the 1970s. They became too big and too oaky into too much alcohol through the 1990s. And finally now, through these experiences, winemakers and wineries are finding the appropriate middle ground, the best possible balance. It is because of and thanks to Robert Parker, in my humble opinion, and his place in the history of wine is that.