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.
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