Tag Archives: Robert Parker

Bored With Fruit

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

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spoiled-fruitPatrick Comiskey at Lucky Peach is reporting an incipient revolution in California winemaking.

No doubt, in California we love our fruit:

In modern winemaking, fussily sorted fruit samples are vinified in squeaky clean cellars into wines of seamless elegance, influenced in part by the autocratic and antiseptic predilections of Robert Parker, the influential critic who has privileged fruit above all other elements. The result was an industry defined by homogeneity, at the expense of funk.

I doubt that Robert Parker is fully responsible; our weather and tastes would naturally lead us in that direction. But the general point is dead on. Up and down the state from the cool climate of Sonoma coast to the hot, inland Central Valley, to the sea-ventilated hills of San Diego, fruit is king, especially now that winemakers are backing off the oak just a bit. Sure some winemakers are better than others at extracting fruit flavors and capturing the distinct terroir of their vineyard but most seem to be aiming for the same thing—to show the fruit in its most pure expression. There is nothing wrong with that but when everyone is doing it, it becomes rather pointless.

And yet for a small but growing number of California winemakers, mere fruit is not enough. “It’s the one thing we have too much of,” says Kevin Kelley of Salinia Wine Company, in Santa Rosa. “I’m much more interested in minerality, in salinity; those things are hard to find in fruit-forward wines.” Abe Schoener of the Scholium Project speaks pugilistically about the process, of “beating the fruit out of the wine.” Howell is more philosophical. “We’re not doing this to preserve fruit,” he says, “we want to transform it.”

Barnyard, blood, meat, mushrooms, flowers, leather, spice, minerality—wine can show a whole range of flavors other than basic fruitiness. Why not let them flourish? Of course that requires playing around with brettanomyces, flor, excessive oxygen, volatile acidity, and all the little critters that inhabit the nooks and crannies of a vineyard or winery. Abe Schoener of the the Scholeum Project is positively enthusiastic about them:

Schoener addresses the problem of fruit in a multitude of ways; he maintains his winery, for starters, in an almost defiantly untidy state, eschewing the use of soaps or solvents—even hot water is used as a last resort. The hope is that the walls and the tanks and barrels will all support an active population of microflorae which will contribute to the wine’s flavors….

“The molecules that produce fruitiness, I want those in my wine,” he says. “But I want something to happen to them.” So he’ll extract to extreme levels (think of steeping tea), or he’ll expose the wine to more oxygen than is typical, so that those fruit flavors morph into something more savory—toward mushrooms, tobacco, and other articulations of umami.

I know it is heresy and I may be drummed out of the wine business for saying it, but I’m bored with fruit. I hope the rebellion catches on. Bring on the funk.

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Are Wine Scores Inflated?

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Complaints about the 100-pt. rating system for wine are ubiquitous in the blogosphere and I’ve commented on it myself. But beating a dead horse is a vastly under-rated activity. Beating a live horse after all would be cruel; and if there were no dead horses around to beat, there would not be much to write about.

So the topic for today is whether score inflation is ruining the 100-pt. wine scoring system. As reported by Wine Searcher

The number of wines given a perfect 100 points by Robert Parker and his fellow Wine Advocate critics stands at more than 500, and the list is growing with exponential speed.

Wine Searcher features a list of the 511 commercially available wines that have been awarded 100 “Parker points” and it makes interesting reading.

So far this year, 69 wines have been elevated to perfect status, following on from 102 last year and the end of the year tends to see a bumper crop. Yet only five years ago, the number of wines awarded 100 points was 38 and even that more than doubled the number from 2004, which was just 17.

Red-to-Brown Wine Reviews reports a similar phenomenon with Australian wine critic James Halliday.

Does this grade inflation render wine scores meaningless? By themselves, these numbers don’t tell us much. If the total number of reviews is increasing then it is not surprising that there are more high-scoring wines. I have no access to information regarding whether Parker’s or Halliday’s publications are simply publishing more reviews.

Parker for his part has responded to these criticisms of score inflation by claiming the general quality of wine is increasing thus leading to higher scores. But critics claim that even if this is true wine critics should tighten their criteria for 95+ wines.

As Red To Brown writes:

Wine criticism is a profession riven with conflicts of interest (a topic for another day). However, I used to be of the belief that these conflicts could largely be managed. However, it seems I was wrong. The plethora of overrated wine about the place would appear to be evidence of this. Ultimately I believe it’s incumbent on people who are scoring things in their professional fields to show a level of restraint and integrity in the way they rate things. Giving everyone a guernsey does no one any good in the long term.
In my day job I’m involved in reviewing and rating investment opportunities for clients. I know that if I were to adopt the Parker or Halliday approach to my scoring I might make some fund managers happy in the short-term, but my credibility would ultimately come under question, and in the end I would be out of a job. Admittedly overrating a wine won’t have the same consequences as putting someone’s life savings in a dud investment, but I’ve got no doubt that if this points inflation trend continues, critics might ultimately find themselves out of a gig. There are only so many times a consumer will buy what they are told is a 96 point wine before it starts to become shorthand for just a solid bottle of wine, at which point how relevant is a wine critic?

I’m rather ambivalent about this. Surely the integrity of wine criticism must be protected. If mediocre wines are given high scores then there is no reason to take scores seriously. But the problem with insisting on tighter standards is that beyond a certain point judgments about wine quality are not tracking objective features of the wine but are dependent on personal preferences of the reviewer. It is relatively easy to assign numerical scores to sub-90 point wines because they will lack features that wine experts largely agree are the mark of excellence in a wine—complexity, intensity, balance, structure, etc. But wines nearer the top of the scale will not be lacking in these features. Thus the score reflects little more than the impression left on the reviewer on that day and how she assesses that impression relative to other wines she has tasted. There is no precisely measured quality that distinguishes a wine scored 96 and one scored 97. That is not to say such scores are meaningless—if you admire Robert Parker’s palate then such distinctions should matter. But they are measuring Parker’s sense of deliciousness, not something more objective.

So what does it mean to tighten standards? It really is a matter of personal integrity and trying to maintain a precise taste memory over time. There is no inherent problem in having more 95+ wines just like there is no inherent problem in have more great artists or great books. There are lots of different ways to be delicious and at some point, ranking them just doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that mediocrity not be granted admission to the pantheon. The issue is not high scores themselves but rather the rewarding of what is unworthy. Score inflation by itself is not necessarily evidence of that.

Ideology and Wine: Why Arguments are Good for the Soul

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Uncategorized, Wine Culture

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semiotic_square_wine_lovers

The pop and sizzle of wine’s ideological battles reminds us that wine is not just a beverage. A few weeks ago Robert Parker took a swipe at what he calls the anti-flavor elite—sommeliers who promote obscure varietals and less extracted wines—and the firestorm of outrage still smolders where the singed meet to lick their emotional wounds. More recently In Pursuit of Balance—a group dedicated to promoting “terroir-driven wines—held their seminar on what proper Pinot Noir and Chardonnay should taste like, and were ridiculed by the inimitable Hosemaster of Wine as “likeminded people who understood that Balance in wine is truthfully defined as the interplay of fruit, marketing, self-promotion and faux philosophy.” As you can imagine, his comment threads lit up with praise  from the fallen whose pursuit of imbalance had left them stumbling about in an oaky, alcohol-induced stupor.

Tom Wark has been notably silent of late in his crusade against “natural wine” marketing, but the guru of “natural wines Alice Feiring posted the above breakdown of wine ideologies, entitled the Semotic Square of Wine Lovers, a marketing device commissioned by Bosco Viticulori to, I suppose, help wine producers and distributors identify their target market.

Feiring proudly wears the “radical” label and I suppose this chart captures something about the voices competing for attention in the wine world. But it leaves out one significant group of wine lovers–knowledgeable consumers who are just looking for great quality to price ratio. Most of my friends who drink wine can’t afford to be wine snobs, have trouble finding “natural wines, and find the appellation system unreliable. So they go to tastings and experiment with whatever seems interesting for a good price and thus may fall into any category on any particular day. I suspect this let-a-million-flowers-bloom-as-long-as-I-can-afford-it crowd is a significant portion of the wine market.

Many wine writers express a kind of world-weariness regarding these debates about what wine should taste like. Stephen Elliot writing for the Coinoisseur’s Guide to California Wine writes:

… I cannot but question the so very predictable agendas of the true-believing parties involved. Moreover, I have become increasingly dismayed at the “with us or against us” ethos of the same, and I wonder just who any of this is meant to serve. I am betting that the principals are delighting in the publicity. It sells books and subscriptions, but more than a few of us in the business are getting fed up…We have for some time heard from our readers that they are becoming bored with the whole shtick. There have been several steady and exceptionally angry internet voices whose pique for Parker borders on neurosis, and more than a few who, like myself, are tired of being made to feel the need to chose sides, have been equally disapproving of both….Please, dear people, by all means drink what you like, but we will all be better off when we reach the point that the success of one winemaking style is not dependent upon on another’s failing. Your wine of choice will not taste any better because you look down your nose at what someone else might like.

I don’t quite understand this complaint. Wine producers and their marketers will always seek to encourage people to drink the style of wine they produce. If customers are buying your wine then they are not buying someone else’s—there are winners and losers in any market and so success might entail someone else’s failure. Furthermore, to judge something as admirable or worthy because it has certain characteristics is to implicitly contrast it with something that lacks those characteristics. To prefer everything equally is to have no preference at all. So if you find yourself consistently preferring one style of wine over another what is wrong with expressing that preference, especially if you are a taste maker in the business of persuading others to share your point of view?

To those who insist we should just taste the wine and forget the ideology, I think this attitude misses the point of ideologies. The 19th Century literary critic Walter Pater wrote:

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end….Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

We develop ideological frameworks because they help us pay attention to what we, out of habit, might fail to notice. Rajat Parr’s constant advice to seek balance or Robert Parker’s diatribes in support of big flavors are attempts to get us to break old habits and look at wine from a different point of view (or in Parker’s case to return to our forgotten roots). Whether one agrees or disagrees with this, I fail to see what is morally objectionable about such advocacy.

We know from all the empirical evidence that beliefs and context influence what we taste. Theories about what wine should taste like are attempts to reframe our drinking habits; they make wine more interesting not less. If they become wearisome it is not because ideas are irrelevant but because they wear out their welcome after awhile and we need new ideas—we need more ideology not less.

“Culture Wars” in the Wine World

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

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culture warsAlder Yarrow called the latest debate in the wine world a “culture war”. On one side are fans of the “Parker-palate” –big, high-alcohol wines from  classic grapes advocated by celebrated wine critic Robert Parker. On the other side are  fans of the “new-breed palate”– higher-acidity, lower alcohol, less concentrated wines often from lesser-known grape varieties advocated by Eric Asimov and Jon Bonné.  The occasion was a tasting of unusual Napa wines at the Symposium of Professional Wine Writers. As Yarrow reports:

And then the taste wars began.

Critic Robert Parker penned an update on his bulletin board from his travels in Asia suggesting that his colleagues, Lisa Perotti-Brown and Jeb Dunnuck thought the wines were lousy, and that the tasting was a “disaster.” My friend David White shared his thoughts about this fairly extreme characterization of the session on his blog, Terroirist.

Perotti-Brown and Dunnuck chimed in confirming their low opinions of the wines, and then the conversations spread like wildfire from there.

A number of Parker subscribers wrote to suggest that they enjoyed those wines, and to point out the fact that Perotti-Brown and Dunnuck could be seen as casting aspersions at at least one wine that had scored 94 points and another that scored 97 points in the pages of the Advocate.

As often happens with such controversies, the discussion flared on the Wine Beserkers bulletin board, where it has extended to more than 200 back and forths.

It’s not my intention to wade into the fray of heated debate here, but merely to point out that clearly there’s something of a culture war going on in the American wine world

As is his habit in recent years, it looks like Parker has jumped the shark, condemning anyone who disagrees with him as incompetent.

This is on the heels of an even more fundamental debate that has been fermenting for some years now between what Tom Wark recently called “land-focused” wines vs. “hand-focused wines.

Today, in nearly any thoughtful discussion of fine wine by knowledgeable drinkers, one finds a near universal bias towards Land-Focused or “terroir-driven” wines over “Hand-Focused” or winemaker-driven wines. This land-focused bias—the belief that wines that accurately depict a terroir are “better” wines—is nothing new. Old World wine drinkers and vintners have held this attitude for generations and have codified the bias into appellation laws.

What I’ve been wondering is this: Is a land-focused fine wine bias a more reasonable or legitimate approach to understanding and appreciating fine wine than a hand-focused bias?

Although interesting for those of us who like a good argument, it’s inflationary to call these debates “culture wars”, as Yarrow admits. Unlike the culture wars over gay rights or religion, where human lives and destinies are at stake, these wine wars will have little effect since they will be ignored by most people who will go on drinking what they like.  More importantly, in a real “culture war”, one is forced to choose sides because to sit on the fence is to be complicit in some great harm that will significantly influence the life chances of people affected by it. But in this debate about wine styles no one is forced to choose (except winemakers I suppose). Big alcoholic reds from warm regions are a distinctive style of winemaking enjoyable for their pure deliciousness and intensity. More restrained, elegant wines with high acidity are interesting because of their liveliness, complexity, and sense of place. We can enjoy both and seek out the best examples of each without choosing sides.

Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Certainly the wine world benefits from diversity like any ecosystem.

As to the distinction between “land-focused” wines vs. “hand-focused” wines, I doubt there is a sharp distinction between the two. The difference is alleged to be the degree to which a winemaker intervenes in the winery to shape the taste of the wine. “Land-focused” wines involve little intervention, allowing the unadorned flavors of the fruit and its location to shine. “Hand-focused” wines are a product of a winemaker’s attempt to shape the wine according to her artistic vision. No doubt, terroir is real and some winemakers seek to preserve it. But winemakers who seek to preserve terroir nevertheless have to interpret what that means and they make countless decisions about when to drop fruit, when to irrigate, sun exposure, when to harvest, not to mention fermentation temps, time to macerate, etc. all in the name of preserving terroir’s signal. Each winemaker will have a different take on it. This is obvious in, for instance, Burgundy where adjacent vineyard plots tended by different growers and winemakers produce vastly different wines despite strict regulations about winery practices. In the end, even hand-focused wines are “mind-driven”, a product of the winemaker’s artistic vision.

Again, we don’t have to choose one or the other but can appreciate each wine for what it is or perhaps what it is striving to be.

These debates are a sign of a vibrant, reflective culture. But there is no war going on—only people advocating that their own sense of taste must be universal. As the 18th Century philosopher Immanuel Kant argued, it is the mark of genuine aesthetic judgment that it strives to be universal.

But there is no reason to take up arms.

Inflated Wine Scores and the Longing for a Wine Aristocracy

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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queen elizabethe The latest brouhaha about wine scores erupted shortly after Christmas when The Wine Advocate, arguably the most influential wine review publication, released its latest assessment of high-end juice.

Using the Advocate’s 100-point system, Antonio Gallioni, the WA’s California expert, awarded 95 points or above to 223 California wines, about 1/4 of the wines receiving published reviews. (The reviews for low scoring wines are not released). Gallioni’s boss Robert Parker gave 100 point scores to 17 wines from the Northern Rhone’s 2009-2011 vintages, which follows on the heels of the 19 100-point scores he gave to the 2009 Bordeaux vintage. I haven’t kept track but Mike Steinberger reports that Parker has given out at least 53 100-point scores since March.

Apparently, grade inflation has migrated from Harvard to Napa.

Many commentators cried foul arguing that this grade inflation made wine scores meaningless. Parker took to his blog to defend his journal’s scoring claiming that wines are simply getting better and the high scores reflect this general improvement.

Mike Steinberger had the most thoughtful critique.

But I think one reason Parker and Galloni have encountered so much skepticism is that if you accept the 100-point scale as a quasi-objective means of assessing wines—and it seems to me that if you buy into the 100-point thing, you are necessarily accepting the idea that it is a quasi-objective standard—then the sheer number of wines clustered at the top of the scale simply isn’t credible.

But I’m not sure I follow Steinberger’s reasoning.

If Parker is right that winemaking has improved since the great but rare Bordeaux vintages of the past, such as the 1947 Chevel Blanc or the 1961 Latour, then clustering at the top of the rankings is precisely what we should expect. Furthermore, Parker’s claim is plausible. Improvements in wine-making technology, advances in the science of winemaking, and the increasingly competitive nature of global wine markets have all contributed to a glut of good wines. There is no reason to think this doesn’t effect the very top of the scale.

Nevertheless Steinberger thinks the scores are excessive:

But even if the overall quality of wines is better, it doesn’t follow that so many wines should be receiving eye-popping scores. If the competition is much tougher now than it was 10 years ago, it shouldn’t be easier to get 96 or 97 points; it should be harder…. Forgive the tautology, but if the bar has been raised, you need to raise the bar. You can do that one of two ways: by lengthening the scale—making the highest score, say, 110 points rather than 100—or by tightening the standards within the 100-point framework to reflect the fact that the quality is so vastly improved. If you don’t do either of those things, you end up in a situation like the one that Parker and Galloni are now confronting—with your reviews being greeted mainly with cynicism and derision.

But why would such “grading on a curve” be more objective? If wine quality really has improved, objectivity would demand that improvement be reflected in the number of highly rated wines, if by “objectivity” we mean something like “tracking the truth”.

It seems to me what Steinberger and other critics are worried about is not objectivity or the erosion of standards. Rather they are worried about the loss of the aura of scarcity surrounding high scoring wines. When perfection becomes the norm it is no longer valuable as a measure of greatness or prestige. Apparently wine still requires an aristocracy.

Steinberger proposes to correct this by lengthening the upper range of possible points or tightening standards within the 100-point limit. But neither solution will enhance the credibility of the system.

If the 100-point system has a flaw it is that point gradations assume more precision than the practice of wine tasting allows. Is there an explainable, projectable difference between a 99 and 100-point wine that can be extended over time so that every time the 100 point wine is tasted it is one point better than the 99? I doubt it. Yet, both of Steinberger’s solutions presuppose an ability to make even more fine-grained judgments about wine quality because either the scorer has more points for which criteria must be found or she must find reason to exclude wines that are otherwise worthy in order to tighten standards. But it is precisely the absence of criteria on which to base scores that is the problem; it can’t be solved by demanding more criteria.

Wine scores have a particular but limited meaning. They measure an expert’s level of enthusiasm for a wine at a particular time and place. This is useful information for a wine buyer to have. But the scores do not precisely track fine gradations of wine quality.

This problem with precision is especially acute with the 100-point wines under discussion. Wines which are that impressive are not going to have obvious flaws (at least when their future performance is taken into account) and will not fail according to the standard criteria used to judge wine. Unlike 90-point wines, 100 point wines will have plenty of balance, structure, power, intensity, elegance, finesse, body, complexity, etc. (at least when their performance is projected into the future) Thus, judgments at this level are bound to be searching for criteria but without a fixed standard to rely on and nothing to which a numerical value can be attached.

An analogy with art criticism might be helpful. Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to grade art. Art professors do it routinely. This is because much student art will satisfy or fail to satisfy standard criteria used to evaluate art and numerical values can be assigned to those criteria. Such grading is not “perfectly objective” whatever that would mean, but the grades nevertheless have meaning if the grading standards are clear.

But it does not follow from this that we can usefully assign numerical grades to the work of Monet, Rembrandt, or Picasso. At this level the ordinary criteria we use to assign a grade to works of art don’t apply. The works of the masters are not lacking in those dimensions that afflict student art. Instead, what we get is a unique vision, something original and incomparable that cannot be captured by a set of standards or criteria. The assignment of a numerical grade would be pointless.

Similarly, for wines that fall into the 95+ range, I doubt there is much point in assigning numerical value. If they lack originality or consummate expressiveness they don’t belong there. If they have it, they cannot be readily compared.

If inferior wines are gaining admittance to the pantheon of legends, we have reason to be skeptical of the 100-point system. But if these wines are indeed worthy when compared to the best from the past, the lack of a scoring system that makes precise qualitative distinctions is not a worry. It is what we should expect from an expanded pantheon of legends. Grade inflation is only grade inflation if the higher grades are undeserved.

This of course makes the 100 point system useless for comparing the best wines, which will make neither Parker nor the investors who place great stock in his scoring system happy.

And if great wines are less rare than they were in the past, isn’t that a cause for celebration? Or is this democracy still pining for aristocracy?

What is “Fine Wine”

09 Friday Dec 2011

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Wine journalist Jamie Goode asks What is fine wine? and Who gets to decide? His answer is:

Fine wines are thought-provoking; they have something to say. They enthral; they inspire. These qualities don’t exist in the wine. They are the result of the interaction between the wine and a taster, and the qualities are a property of the taster in response to the wine.

And who gets to decide? Wine experts would seem to be the only authority. But expert opinion on wine is all over the map.Thus, Goode argue,s a subset of wine experts have the requisite qualifications

I’ve noticed that in recent years a new generation of wine people have emerged who seem to get wine – a group that encompasses winemakers, retailers, critics and agents. They have a more-or-less shared taste, in that they prefer elegance over power, dislike over-ripeness, delight in wines that express a sense of place, aren’t afraid to explore new flavours and lesser known regions, and at the same time respect the classic European fine wines.

These are the people who should get to decide what is fine and what isn’t.

Afficionados of powerful wines and ripe fruit—roughly, the Robert Parker set—might strenuously disagree. Is there a reason to consider elegance over power the mark of fine wine?

We might take a page from art history to help sort out this issue. The distinction between fine art and craft is usually drawn as follows. A piece of craftwork has a job to do, a function that the craftsperson well understands. The craftsperson thus skillfully creates a work that does its job exceedingly well, without flaws, and achieves technical excellence in how it performs. Style matters but is subordinate to function.

A work of fine art commands our attention, not because of the function it performs or because the technique was excellent, but because it is a personal expression of the artist’s viewpoint and because it stimulates the imagination and intellect. Great works of art have a sense of mystery about them; there is something to be understood that requires focused attention on the part of the viewer or listener.

Wines that exhibit power require great technique in the vineyard and in the winery ( and good luck with the weather) in order to extract maximum flavor and texture. Modern technology has made this more readily achievable. And the virtues of such wines strike you right in the palate—without ambiguity. They are well-crafted. But all that power can obliterate any sense of mystery or sense of place. And because elegance is in part a matter subtlety and nuance, elegance may be hard to detect in highly extracted wines. It is this sense of mystery, place, and the tracking of elegance that stimulates the intellect and the imagination.

So I think Goode is right that in fine wine we should prefer elegance to power. But it is important to note that power does not preclude elegance. Perhaps the mark of the finest winemakers is their ability to achieve both power and elegance.

After all, few would want to say that Beethoven, Picasso, or Pink Floyd were limp or flabby.