Robert Parker’s Bitch

March 10th, 2009 → 9:46 am @ Josh Hermsmeyer


There’s an interesting post up at GoodGrape today where Jeff writes these words:

Wine is different. The Golden Rule? That notion where you treat others as you would like to be treated? No shit, that happens in the wine business…

From a business perspective, you send an email and somebody responds. You leave a voice mail and somebody calls you back. It is the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.

It is not like the real business world. It is a little bit of an idyllic bubble. It is like a gigantic Unitarian church, where all of God’s creatures are welcome…

You would think that at some point when there are 6100 wineries in the country and only a handful of influential critics that there might be a fomenting group of people that try to create a tidal wave of change against points, but not so much.

A tidal wave of change? In the wine industry? Riiiight.

But that’s true for any industry. It’s not as if GM, when they saw the writing on the wall a decade ago and knew that their days of producing large, high margin vehicles were numbered, suddenly flew into furious action developing the Volt. Nope.

First GM needed to see the Prius succeed. They needed to see to believe. Same with the wine biz.

Which brand will be the first to become a runaway hit due to forces other than Parker or Laube? Until it happens, for most winery owners, all this talk about a 100 point upheaval, social media, blogs and direct sales will be pie in the sky. Sure they’ll dabble, sure they’ll do samples and make sure their tasting room is open, donate to charity, and perhaps even sponsor certain events or open a Twitter account. But they won’t believe.

Of course it may already be too late for GM. If they do survive it will be because you and I bail them out under the theory that they are “too big to fail”. Winery owners don’t have the luxury of moral hazard, so Jeff is probably right that we should all be trying harder.

But there are folks whispering about a world where unrated, poorly rated, and even highly rated wines sell despite their ratings (or lack thereof).

Tina Caputo is leading the charge in highlighting some of them in her recent mini documentary: Robert Parker’s Bitch. Randy Dunn and Tom Eddy have been fighting the fight for years, and Tina does a great job of telling their stories.

I also make an appearance, yammering on about something or other. Incredibly, I got this humbling tweet a couple days back from W.R. Tish:

Tish’s basic ethos – conversations about wine can be both smart and funny (in fact he was a literary editor at the legendary Harvard Lampoon) – has been a central inspiration for me. So you can imagine that his kind words will end up as boilerplate on my blog somewhere very very soon.

Anyway, give the video a watch. It’s pretty good times.

And if you, dear reader, are serious about all this talk of a revolution, spread the word. Link up the video, talk about it, tweet about it and post about it.

Make our whispers become a roar.