If ever you need to rouse a vineyard owner from vinous slumber, creep up behind him and whisper ‘Parker’. He will leap to his feet, eyes blazing, either with $ signs or with aggrieved Gallic pride. For the name of Robert M. Parker Jr is charged with electricity throughout the world of wine.
His is an extraordinary story, in human and sociological as well as in wine industry terms, and here is very well told, with due verve and enthusiasm. It will fascinate anyone interested in late 20th-century developments, not only wine-lovers. Elin McCoy knows and has worked with Parker; she is a distinguished food and wine writer, and she can be critical of him.
Many can’t. To his subscribers he is ‘Mr P.’, in Bordeaux ‘le grand Bob’, elsewhere ‘le Gourou’, here ‘the Emperor’, in Japan ‘the God of Wine’, an ascending graph that makes you tremble for some last-chapter nemesis. But at the end he is still living in a quiet town in Maryland, still tasting, still eating heroic meals and still in love with wine.
The one thing not wildly controversial about Parker is his prodigious palate and his memory of its sensations. When, for 11 years, he was a reluctant (if successful) lawyer he methodically developed his sense of smell, identifying its every sensation as he walked down the street, and analysed every taste, so that the first sniff in a wine glass would tell him most of what he needed to know and his tongue the rest.
But it was love, not careerism or drink, that fired his passion for wine. He followed his future wife to France in 1968 for what McCoy calls his epiphany: the two penniless students bluffed their way (by her prettiness and good French, he says) into the grandest wineries in Bordeaux, and the Parker phenomenon was born.
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