Robert Parker: ‘This Jihad’, ‘Extremists’ and ‘Blobbers’
April 28th 2009, by GQ
It’s all been going off in wine cyberspace, with the world’s most powerful wine critic, Robert Parker, in a bit of a black hole. Tyler Colman, as reported in his wine blog drvino.com last week, questioned Parker if his team on The Wine Advocate had accepted hospitality from the wine trade. It turns out that they have and, although this is hardly a heinous crime, it conflicts with Parker’s own well publicized, lofty standards.
However, instead of simply putting the record straight and squashing the story, Parker hit out at bloggers and others in the forum on his website, which in turn is controlled with a heavy hand by one of the alleged guilty parties, Mark Squires.
I posted this comment, entitled ‘Has Parker lost the Plot?’ on Jancis Robinson’s ’subscribers only’ forum, following her article called ‘The ethics of wine writing‘:
“Has anyone else been following the link from Jancis’s perfectly-pitched article on ‘The ethics of wine writing’, to drvino.com? At first, Robert Parker squares off his own, much publicized rules (’It is imperative for a wine critic to pay his own way. Gratuitous hospitality in the form of airline tickets, hotel rooms, guest houses, should never be accepted…’) with those of some of his Wine Advocates (’I did tell Jay no more vineyard tours paid by Wines of Argentina’).
More amusing is the attack on bloggers and others, with Parker seeing himself, rather bizarrely, as the underdog. Look out for conspiracy theories about ‘this Jihad’, ‘blobbers’, ‘extremists’ and, er, Decanter magazine. Even the Taliban get a mention.
Riveting stuff.”
Jancis responded:
“I am jumping in here – some of you will understand why I am wary of stirring up anything Parker-related – simply to state my belief that the way we can all best benefit from this interweb thingy is to be as open as possible. Visitors to this forum and this site should feel quite free to link to any other sites and blogs, and comment on them.
I know the odd purple pager has been rather coy about mentioning other wine sites and/or apologised for linking to them, but I think the interesting issues raised in this thread show just how difficult, and probably counter-productive, it is to try to erect walls in cyberspace.
I shall return to this topic!”
I’m not convinced that we’ve seen the end of this either – unless, of course, our attention is diverted by the less important things in life, like a global Swine Flu pandemic.
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