Wine Chat 003: Parker v. Galloni, and the Loosening Grip of Traditional Wine Critics’ Influence

Wine for Normal People

Alcohol, Lifestyle, Arts, Education, Food, Wine, Dining, Grapes

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2013

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As we’re making our way through edits for this week’s podcast, we did a Wine Chat/Mini-cast to fill in. This is on a very important issue that I think is going to shake up the wine critic world permanently. Kind of a big deal. Here’s a link to the Decanter.com story that covered this: Parker v. Galloni If you don’t want to read it, here’s the short of the story: Famed American critic Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate, who single-handedly sets prices and makes reputations for wines and who has arguably changed the way winemakers make wine so they can garner high scores, sold a large portion of his brand to a group of Singapore investors and shook up the structure of the subscription-only newsletter. His named successor for evaluating California wine, Antonio Galloni, stepped down after the move and started his own Web site. He decided to withhold all the scores for Sonoma wines he had conducted prior to the sale, stating that he would publish [...]

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is not a full episode. So what is it?
0:14.7	Well, we said that we were going to do a few fill-ins, either wine reviews or otherwise.
0:19.5	And this is big, big news in the wine industry. If you don't follow it, it's no big deal.
0:24.0	But you probably should be aware of it,
0:25.0	because I personally think,
0:26.0	and some of the folks that I've spoken to
0:28.0	in the wine industry think,
0:29.0	that this particular event
0:31.0	is like the downfall of the critics
0:33.5	empires these days.
0:35.4	And we're talking the name in wine reviews, right?
0:39.7	That's right, Robert Parker.
0:41.0	All right, so let me give the background on it and then we can discuss, which is that there's some
0:44.8	stuff that went down with Robert Parker.
0:46.8	He is getting older and he realizes that there's a lot of equity in his brand.
0:50.6	He's not a dumb guy.
0:51.8	He started this little newsletter that became the
0:55.2	absolute go-to it was mailed out and he hired all consultants to work with him he
1:02.3	has never hired or had a large staff.
1:05.6	Go rent the movie, Mandovino. It's a documentary about, really about Robert Parker and
1:12.1	his consultants and how they've influenced how wine has been
1:16.5	manufactured.
	...

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