I suppose I should have qualified my diatribe by singling out those critics whose words move the market.

Numerous times over the past decades a Parker review has made a winery (it no longer breaks one, because the above-board, true critic hardly reviews anymore wines that suck, which in itself is a suspicious possibility).

With stakes so high, and with a critical brand that obviously has lowered its standards by bringing on inexperienced reviewers as well as by overlooking its own stringent policies, the temptation to “fool” the critics is too great not to have happened.

In one of his posts on this issue, Parker allowed that maybe 20 frauds might have passed his critical judgment over the years. He offered no names or any indication if he was speculating or capitulating to his critics. But the fact that he acknowledges it publicly (whatever the real number is) is not a good sign at all. If real quality control was in play, he wouldn’t be forced to admit such a thing.

Your reviews are stellar, precisely because you often do them with context–food–and you make no claims to having a mission to protect the consumer from the bad wines of the world. Were you to make that lofty claim, I’d be watching you closely. Parker says that he modeled his advocacy after Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy–I like most of what Nader stands for, but there also are reasons not to trust him implicitly, but that’s another story…