Product Description
This is the story of how an American lawyer raised on Coca-Cola caused a revolution in the way wines around the globe are made, sold, and talked about. The world’s most influential wine critic, Robert M. Parker, Jr., has dominated the international wine community for the last quarter century, embodying the triumph of American taste. Using Parker’s story as a springboard, author Elin McCoy offers an authoritative and unparalleled insider’s view of the eccentric pe… More >>
The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr., and the Reign of American Taste
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good book- easy read -not much wine information but a lot of data on other wine writers. reads like fiction- easy to pick up and put down.
Rating: 5 / 5
Nice but a bit long and not specific enough like what did the team PArker& Rolland bring etc
Rating: 3 / 5
Pinot Envy…
Reviews by Joe Rosenberg
BOOK:
The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the reign of American Taste
by Elin McCoy
Ecco, 2005
FILM:
“Mondovino”
by Jonathan Nossiter
Think Film 2005
Both The Emperor of Wine…. and “Mondovino” are centered on wine writer Robert M. Parker, a lifetime resident of Monkton in Baltimore County, and detail his journey from the law to international fame as a wine connoisseur.
The book is a chronicle of Parker’s life to date by a fellow wine writer. The movie is a lengthy discourse on the ills of modern winemaking and marketing by a director who lacks objectivity and balance.
Time out for my disclaimer: From 1978 to 1985, I spent many Friday nights at Mr. Parker’s house as part of a sounding board he set up to calibrate the accuracy of his judgments. I also spent other nights at the Parkers’ home, and Parker spent time at wine tastings I sponsored at my Woodlawn apartment, Dalesio’s and Chez Fernand’s restaurants, and other venues. Parker introduced me to people I eventually worked for in the wine business. I watched him grow as a person and saw how scrupulous he was in conducting his business. Although I rarely see him these days, he is still a friend even though he never reviewed one of my Winemayven Selections.
That said, Ms. McCoy’s 300 pages of biography has captured Parker–generous, affable but wary of criticism–starting even before he scooped the wine world on the high quality of the 1982 Bordeaux. To those not in this rarefied world, red wines from Bordeaux are the Rosetta stone of collectors of old wines and of baby-boomer yuppies anxious to own everything worthwhile in the universe. So when Parker announced that the 1982 vintage was most collectable, a combination of demand fueled by major wine stores and nay-saying from other wine writers led Parker to leave his day job and begin work on his book on Bordeaux wines.
Parker was able to branch out from his bi-monthly Wine Advocate to other venues. He often prefaced his wine reviews in other publications with words like “As I told you in Vol. 6, Number 4, the Chateau Vonce estate is beginning to make…” His “As I told you” reminded his readers that he found the wine first, or at least early on. As a businessman, he wanted his Wine Advocate to be a wine geek’s publication of choice.
Until Parker, wine criticism was a world of bull and avarice. Parker was among the early newsletter writers who were champions of the consumer and not lifestyle mavens. If you’ve ever tasted a wine in Europe and then back in the USA, you’d realize that the wine was mishandled in transit. By encouraging Kermit Lynch, Marc DeGrazia and other importers who knew that reefer was not just another word for a joint, Parker raised the level of how a wine was handled. When the Wine Advocate started publication, you could not find a rosé in Maryland that was less than three years old; great vintages were not delivered to Maryland because wholesalers still had mediocre vintages in inventory. Parker created demand.
All in all, for those unfamiliar to Parker’s rise from drinking Coca Cola at the feed store to downing Dom with Charlie Rose, this book is a good read. I would have liked to have seen some more of our Friday night crew mentioned, like Geoff Connor, Steve Sheriff and Mitch Pressman.
On the other hand, Nossiter’s screed on the screen is a mean-spirited attack on Parker and celebrity winemaker Michel Rolland. Nossiter had some valid points but his editing is slanted. Parker and Rolland have influence in the wine world because consumers like the wines Parker praises and Rolland consults for. To me, some consumers are overly finicky and fanatical, not buying any wine scored below 95 points or wanting to buy the entire allocation a store is allotted; and people in the trade don’t try to acquire and then sell wines not praised by either the Wine Advocate or the life-style oriented commercial Wine Spectator. Most of the wine sales in the US are not the artisan wines coveted by subscribers to those publications, but everyday quaffs that make the day a bit brighter.
Robert M. Parker, Jr. has made it possible for the public to move from merely drinking wine to experiencing wine as an aesthetic, culinary and cultural pleasure. He has become an American icon.
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Copyright © 2005 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on July 26, 2005.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’m relatively new to wine and don’t have extensive tasting experience. A lot of people who’ve been following wine for 20 or 30 years know a lot of the material carried in Elin McCoy’s book. I didn’t, so I found it informative. It seems to go a good ways towards explaining Parker’s influence. I don’t like most Bordeaux, but I find Parker’s advice valuable in picking Rhones, California pinot noir and Spanish wines, so I’m a fan of his. McCoy’s book attempts to describe the whole man. I don’t know Parker but it seems generally a good portrait. Some things annoy me about the book, though. For instance, in talking about the California label Red Zeppelin, which seemed to be poking fun at Parker with one of its labels, she notes Parker had less-than-flattering words for the wine. The implication I got was that Parker was thin-skinned and criticized the wine. No one that I’ve talked to about the wine who has tried thought it was any better than average. I tried it once and thought it was okay, but more of a gimmick wine than a serious wine. There’s a few errors that I’m surprised neither she nor her editors caught. The newsgroup alt.food.wine has a .com stuck on to the end, meaning neither McCoy nor her editor understood that it’s possible to be on the Internet and not the World Wide Web.
But if you love wine and buy it in places other than the supermarket, this is an interesting book.
Rating: 4 / 5
It’s tempting to review McCoy’s book using Parker’s style: sometimes this book is “light bodied, superficial, with little fruit” but most often the author can reach “deep color, rich, concentrated with long after taste”. Thanks to a solid journalistic approach, McCoy presents an excellent summary of the evolution of the wine markets in the last 20 years. Robert Parker was instrumental and benefited from the growing worldwide interest for high quality and expensive wines and McCoy manages extremely well to depict how all this happened.
Now it is clear that McCoy did not have enough access to Parker to write the definitive book about him. She relies heavily on old printed materials and conversations with people who have been in contact with Parker over the years. The fact that Parker publicly stated that some of the facts mentioned in the book are wrong is disturbing. Which ones?
One sometimes would expect to hear McCoy’s own opinion: for instance, she keeps mentioning complains about the 100 point rating scale. Why not opening a debate? She does it only briefly at the end of the book. In my view, everybody knows what Parker likes and most wine lovers know how to benchmark Parker’s scores and comments. The way all of us interpret the scores and wines’ descriptions is as important as the score themselves. If Parker assigns a 92 thanks to high fruit concentration, those who like it will accept the score, those who prefer finesse and elegance will notch the score down but will buy the wine if they feel like drinking a super concentrated young wine. Finally, one can be surprised by at least two serious omissions: the relationship between Parker and Bordeaux star oenologist Michel Rolland is hardly mentioned whereas it is a key element in today’s wine world. Also, Parker’s praise of Château Le Pin in Pomerol which helped transform an unknown property into one of the most expensive wines should also have been mentioned as it is a more relevant example than some of the California wines Mc Coy mentioned.
Nothing really new for wine lovers who already know most of the stories but the style is pleasant, the book heavily documented with a lot of attention to details (foreign words are correctly spelled except Châteauneuf du Pape on page 224 and the quote in Le Nouvel Observateur on page 287…).
Rating: 4 / 5