The power and the story

For better or worse, Robert Parker Jr., a self-taught wine geek from the suburbs of Baltimore, Md., is the single most powerful individual in the buying and selling of fine wine throughout the world today. Parker turned a newsletter edited at his kitchen table, the bimonthly Wine Advocate, into a source of singular influence in an industry historically dominated by European aristocrats and old-money millionaires.

The publication of Elin McCoy’s “The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste,” (Ecco, $25.95) is a milestone in what is as much a phenomenon as a career. Although magazines, newspapers and the wine press have published reams of copy chronicling Parker’s dramatic rise, McCoy’s is the first full-length biography; it has been highly anticipated.

McCoy, a 30-year veteran wine writer, brings a longtime friendship with Parker to bear on her insider’s view of his life. She gave Parker his first national magazine assignment as an editor at Food & Wine magazine and has had dinner at his home, and while researching this book, she was invited to join him as he tasted a recent vintage of some of the California wines he helped popularize. Far from being a disinterested observer, she has included first-person accounts of herself as a participant in some of the scenes she describes.

An authoritative chronicler of the events that shaped Parker’s career, McCoy offers detailed accounts of such defining moments as Parker’s decision to declare the 1982 Bordeaux to be a superior vintage, breaking with the leading critics of the day. She has just as doggedly pulled together minutiae concerning such negative events as the lawsuit filed by Burgundian Francois Faiveley that led many Burgundian negociants and growers to close their doors to Parker, or the more recent scandal involving Parker’s French translator, Hanna Agostini, who was arrested on criminal charges of forgery and breach of trust.

The thoroughness of McCoy’s reporting is impressive. Interviewing key vintners in Europe and California, she quotes not only those who admire Parker and have seen their fortunes soar because of his critical praise, but also critics such as Burgundy importer Becky Wasserman, who says of Parker’s homogenizing effect on winemaking: “Why must I submit everything I do to one person to be judged? Should I show all the wines or just those I know he would like, even if Burgundy is diversity and individuality?”

But McCoy’s prodigious reporting hasn’t turned up significant new information. Although she scores an exclusive interview with Agostini, for example, it doesn’t add much to the story. So for industry insiders, there’s little in the book to entice, leaving wine enthusiasts who are merely curious about Parker as the book’s best audience.

Unfortunately, the focus on insider detail and the plodding pace make it a tough slog. For instance, a narrative following the ups and downs of the leading American and British wine critics of the last century -- a group notable for its comparative lack of influence -- has little general appeal.

McCoy devotes the first third of her book to following Parker from his childhood as a small-town boy with a taste for Coca-Cola and Velveeta cheese through his years as a staff lawyer for a Baltimore bank. She details his first trips to Europe and his growing love affair with wine, experiences typical of many middle-class baby boomers. But the same ground was covered more vividly in William Langewiesche’s December 2000 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly and in David Shaw’s series on Parker for The Times the year before.

Whether the pervasiveness of Parker’s influence came about because he reflected the taste of his generation or because his generation so readily followed his recommendations has been a heated debate in the wine world.

What’s clear is that by codifying his taste into a 100-point scale and using easy to understand phrases like “gobs of fruit,” Parker gave the doctors, lawyers and wine retailers who were his early subscribers a shorthand way to judge wine. He reduced the daunting challenge of filling a cellar with the best wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, California and the rest of the world’s top wine regions to a paint-by-numbers game that anyone could play.

Because Parker readers could more easily identify the wines they wanted to buy, they bought more wine. And as more consumers bought the wines that Parker recommended, their prices skyrocketed.

Ultimately, McCoy points out, it has ceased to matter whether Parker’s wine judgments are “right.” Wine consumers have become so slavishly devoted to following his opinions that the demand for his favorites continues to soar, giving him unparalleled power over the market. And many other wine critics have adopted Parker’s 100-point scale and accepted the popularity of the big, juicy wines that tend to be drinkable early in their lives -- Parker’s favorites.

A sum of contradictions

McCoy describes the contradictions of Parker’s relationship with the wine industry, noting that he “argued for the democratization of wine” but became “the supreme judge,” that “he railed against high prices, but whenever he anointed a wine, its price went up, and up, and up” and that he “argued for diversity of styles, yet in some regions what he wrote ended up promoting wines that began to taste alike.”

And, to her credit, she goes beyond earlier publications about Parker to offer a look into Parker’s character, showing him to be a single-minded, hubristic man with no apparent intellectual curiosity about anything he can’t put in his mouth. She shows him pettily bashing other critics on his website, posting such heated responses to their wine evaluations that British wine critic Jancis Robinson posted this query on her own website: “Am I really not allowed to have my own opinion?”

Unfortunately, “The Emperor of Wine” lacks the insight and larger context that would make the book more than just a catalog of facts about Parker. McCoy settles for a sketch of an ordinary man, a model father, husband and son who happens to have a remarkable set of sensory receptors, a gift marred only by his unattractive tendency to belittle his critics.

By stopping with that superficial analysis, she leaves the reader fumbling for a bottom line, some hint of where Parker’s influence and talents will lead next. If this is his zenith, will his influence wane? What’s on the horizon? McCoy squanders the opportunity to bring significance to the uniquely American story of how one individual can change the course of events, even in a realm as steeped in tradition as fine wine.