Sterling Wine Auctions Australia

Who loves Parkie? Robert Parker jnr Has given Aussie wine the Flick! Apparently the great man has more important things to do than taste Aussie wines so he has passed the job on to Jay Miller. Read the full story from the Bulletin.

Bulletin Tuesday October 10th

Australian wine loses a voice

Stop the presses ... the Australian wine industry has just received some sobering news, writes Campbell Mattinson.

American Robert Parker jnr, the man whose reviews have been largely dictating what wines Australia produces, has announced that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wine. That the back of the world's most powerful critic is now turned, or half-turned (someone else will be writing reviews for him), is a blow that the Australian wine industry can ill afford.

Parker's written opinions are so influential that there are now entire wine regions - Bordeaux, and the Barossa among them - that have shifted the style of wine they make to accommodate his taste.

As Michael Twelftree, founding partner of the Barossa-based Two Hands winery, said of Parker's announcement: "There is only one Robert Parker, and there only ever will be. He's an anomaly. He's so big in wine that when he dies, those wines that have received perfect points from him will explode in price - just because they've been in his mouth. So of course this is a loss to Australian wine."

Parker's impact has been significant. When he lifted a glass of Three Rivers Shiraz (a black Barossan beauty so intense it has been known to permanently stain glassware) for the first time in 1997 and then wrote: "My first impression on tasting this Shiraz was, 'My God, this smells like a pristine example of 1947 Cheval Blanc'," and scored it 99 out of 100, the Australian wine industry was turned upside down.

Within months, the wine (now called Chris Ringland Shiraz) that cost $A60 a bottle was fetching $US1000 ($1346) at auction. The race was on to produce wines just like it.

New wines, labels and wineries sprang up. The price of grapes from those precious old vineyards, many previously earmarked to be dug up, in many cases tripled. Wine investment houses sprung up, and along came the (short-lived) Australian Wine (Stock) Exchange and a raft of desirable wines that, until Robert Parker anointed them, barely anyone had heard of, such as Torbreck Run Rig Shiraz, Greenock Creek Roennfeldt Road Shiraz, various Clarendon Hills wines and Wild Duck Creek Duck Muck Shiraz.

Business plans were written that went, basically, thus: Make dense black wine. Make Robert Parker taste it. Make lots of money.

It changed the way a lot of people, here and abroad, viewed Australian wine. It's a madness that has been ongoing ever since, though the collapse of the wine investment houses Heritage Fine Wines and Wine Orb, combined with the current oversupply of Australian wine, has tempered it.

It's a madness that prompts Andrew Caillard, director at leading wine auction house Langton's, to quip that while Parker's "judgements have been an excellent foil to entrenched and established thought in Australia", news that he's no longer reviewing Australian wine is "fantastic. It will calm down a cottage industry that has become increasingly full of itself, remarkably boastful and dangerously close to Midas".

Parker's chief publication, The Wine Advocate, will still carry Australian wine reviews - but they won't be written by Parker. That responsibility will be handed to a new member of his team - former wine retailer Jay Miller. Exactly why Parker is passing over Australian wine, having struck such a thunderbolt through it, he hasn't said directly, and remains open to speculation. What can be said for sure, though, is that wine brands are multiplying at a rapid rate the wine world over, and so the number of regions a single person can hope to cover is necessarily decreasing. Australia is a prime example: the number of different wines made each year is double what it was even 10 years ago.

There are other major inter- national wine regions covered in The Wine Advocate by people other than Parker, but these reviews tend not to create the frenzy that a Parker review can. Caillard told The Bulletin: "The market will not respond to his [Jay Miller's] views in the same way. This will obviously have an impact on those wineries who have relied on Parker ... if they do now have a hole in their business plan, they have dug it themselves."

A number of Australian wines are today made essentially for America, usually via a healthy Parker review. The flamboyant Mollydooker range, by Sarah and Sparky Marquis, is the most successful of these. What will become of these and similar wines, if the Parker influence slowly drains away, remains to be seen.

Though it could be worse. As winemaker Chris Ringland notes, "Jay Miller is enormously exper-ienced, has a superb palate and is a real friend of Australian wine." Robert Parker has left Australian wine - but at least a sympathetic palate is in his place.

October 2006