Dr. Parker or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying (About Scores) and Love the Little Wines

Shaquille O’Neal.  Ann Coulter.  Jackson Pollack.  James Carville.  Mark Cuban.  Igor Stravinsky.  Noam Chomsky.  Andy Warhol.  Andre the Giant.  In life, the biggest and loudest among us get the most attention – while  finesse and nuance, toiling in relative obscurity, float in the choppy wake of incendiary, splashy, larger-than-life personalities.

Wine is no different.  In a world where extract and alcohol are hallmarks of so-called “cult” wines, and where ripe fruit and palate weight are required to garner the scores necessary for market success, little attention is paid to those wines that favor understated elegance over hyperbolic heft. 

In a way, this is no one’s fault. Wine critics want to be consistent when they grade wines so that their voices will be trusted and they’ll make a good living.  Wine drinkers want to buy wines that win medals and get high scores.  That’s understandable – we all want to get as much quality with our limited resources as possible, and it seems reasonable that high marks from an expert at a blind tasting competition is a good proxy for quality. And winemakers want their wines to sell well, which brings them the dual benefit of economic gain and psychological satisfaction.   

So it should seem perfectly natural that critics give wines with certain qualities high marks and wines with other qualities low marks; consumers buy wines that get big scores and don’t buy wines that don’t; and vintners make wines that have qualities likely to attract high ratings. All of this nurtures a feedback cycle whereby the quantity of wine being produced, and the allocation of wine industry attention and resources, skews ever more in favor of the kind of wines that get big scores.