Robert Parker Death And Obituary – American wine reviewer Robert McDowell Parker Jr. has recently retired. His 100-point wine evaluations and his publication, The Wine Advocate, have a significant impact on US wine consumption, which has a bearing on how much freshly released Bordeaux wines cost. He is now the most well-known and respected wine critic in the world as a result of this.
Baltimore, Maryland, is where Parker was born. His father sold construction equipment. He earned an honors degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he double majored in history and art history. He completed his education at the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland School of Law, where he earned a Juris Doctor degree in 1973. When he traveled to Alsace as a student to visit his future wife Patricia, he first tasted wine. He served as Farm Credit Bank of Baltimore’s associate general counsel for more than ten years until leaving in March 1984 to focus solely on writing about wine.
Parker started penning wine guides in 1975. Parker wants to write about wine without any conflicts of interest that might sway the opinions of other critics who also earn a profession selling wine, following the lead of consumer advocate Ralph Nader. The Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate, afterwards known as The Wine Advocate, was a direct mail newsletter he began in 1978. Consumers on the mailing list that Parker acquired from numerous well-known vintners received the first issue free of charge. The second issue, which was published later that year, cost money and was sent to 600 charter subscribers.
Parker praised the 1982 Bordeaux vintage, which garnered widespread notice, in contrast to the opinions of many other experts, including San Francisco critic Robert Finnigan, who believed it to be excessively ripe and low in acid. Bordeaux 1982 regularly commanded greater prices than other vintages, even if the vintage’s longevity is still up for question.
The Wine Advocate has more than 50,000 subscribers today, mostly in the US, but it also receives a sizable amount of readers from more than 37 other nations. Although if other wine periodicals have more readers, The Wine Advocate is nevertheless thought to have a sizable impact on wine consumers’ purchasing decisions, particularly in the US. According to Frank Pryor, a wine reviewer for “The New York Times,” Robert M. Parker Jr. is the most significant wine critic working today.