Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Is Parker an Outlier?

Does Robert Parker have an idiosyncratic palate whose financial success is driving the wine industry to produce wines tailored to his taste or are his assessments of quality consistent with those of other critics? Alder has a very interesting post on the subject:

I have long maintained that this “sky is falling” point of view (perhaps best typified by the irresponsible polemic, Mondovino) and in particular the demonization of Robert Parker’s palate as monolithic represents a sort of irrational fanaticism with little basis in reality.

My observations, for as long as I have been following the world of wine criticism, have led me to believe that, contrary to the whining and accusations of many, most of the world’s top wine critics tend to completely agree with Parker when it comes to most of the top wines of the world.

And now there’s actually been a study that seems to bolster my anecdotal convictions. Conducted by the Center for Hospitality Research at Cornell University, this recently released study was commissioned to examine the hypothesis that the ordered ranking of Bordeaux Chateaux into First Growths, Second Growths, etc. that has been in place since 1855 may no longer be truly accurate. In the process of testing this hypothesis, the researchers have produced the only statistical analysis I have ever seen that compares the rankings of major wine critics across similar wines. And while it was not the purpose of their research, their findings on the correlation of scores between The Wine Spectator, Robert Parker, and Stephen Tanzer are quite remarkable.

In short: these three sources are in near complete agreement on which wines are the best, and they have been for three decades. This result utterly refutes the idea that somehow Parker’s “skewed” palate has driven the wine market to a place that it would not have otherwise gone on its own.

And he offers this graphic to prove the point: