The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy

This book was sitting on our book shelves for the longest time. I picked it up for something to read on my trip out to visit family. Yes, I abandoned my husband to take care of the vineyard alone, but feeling sorry for him, our friends have come out in droves to help him. Thanks to all of our friends!
The brouhaha over Robert Parker and his singular influence over wine styles is not something that people in the business are unaware of, but this book written by Elin McCoy and published in 2005 provided an important context for me to understand the person. He grew up in an era where wine was just beginning to become accessible to more that the upper class and Julia Child was teaching America how to prepare French cuisine. On the West Coast, Alice Waters having an epiphany that simple, yet fresh ingredients can be transformative, opened a restaurant called Chez Panisse in San Francisco in 1971. There were wine writers, this was nothing new, and McCoy mentions Bob Balzac and Bob Finigan as people engaged in writing wine newsletters. On the East Coast, Frank Prial was writing a wine column for The New York Times and whenever he wrote about a wine, the area shops would typically sell out of that wine. So what did Robert Parker do that was so revolutionary to have such an overwhelming impact on the wine industry? Could it be that he was the first to use a 100 point system to rank wines that he tasted and wrote about it in his newsletter called The Wine Advocate? Could it be that he claimed to be an advocate for the wine consumer, modeled after Ralph Nader and purchased all of the wines he reviewed with his own money? Could it be his stance on the 1982 French vintage, calling it the vintage of the century?
After his unwavering promotion of the 1982 vintage in France, and the validation that followed, Robert Parker gained prominence. I can remember my husband and our friend subscribing to his newsletter and reading about all of the wines that Parker had reviewed in that issue. It was a teaching tool and a tool that allowed us to understand what a certain wine could taste like, if you had a palate like Parkers. As time passed, we began to understand what Parker meant when he wrote that a wine was "hedonistic" or "unctuous". It could be that our palates were diverging. Here is where I fall. I think that it was important for a person like Parker to provide information that was lacking in the literature at that time. He showed you a path, but you have to forge your own!
The book was a good read and parts of it is just out there in the ethersphere as is a lot of the controversy surrounding Parker's influence. It effectively passed the time for me while I took 3 flights to arrive "home".