Parker and his good points

The world’s most influential wine critic is careless, error-prone and under the influence of Bordeaux châteaux owners, according to allegations in a biography by his former assistant.

Robert Parker, an American, is portrayed as a self-publicist who has apparently never even tasted some of the wines upon which he comments.

Hanna Agostini, who worked with Parker for eight years, also questions the independence of the so-called Emperor of Wine, saying that he has enjoyed sumptuous banquets with producers whose bottles he has subsequently praised. But the biography – Robert Parker, Anatomie d’un Mythe – has provoked a row in France.

Parker’s supporters denounce the book as an act of vengeance by a woman dismissed by the critic in 2003 amid allegations of false accounting.

Parker, a former lawyer from Baltimore who became a wine critic after visiting France in 1967, has long been accused of imposing his own tastes on the industry. With his guides selling hundreds of thousands of copies on every print run and his advice followed on both sides of the Atlantic, vineyards in Bordeaux are suspected of adapting their wine to please him.

French researchers found that a good mark from Parker adds up to 15 per cent to a bottle’s value. The critic became famous when he rejected conventional opinion by praising the 1982 Bordeaux vintage – a judgment that other critics later admitted was right. He has insured his nose for $1 million (£488,000).

But Agostini claims to draw on private correspondence with Parker, 60, in an attempt to cast doubts over his eminence. In his 2005 Bordeaux guide, he rated the Domaine de Jaugaret as “notable” and recommended that it be drunk in two to six years. But, according to the book, he wrote to her: “I don’t know this wine.”

As for Château Jander, which he described as “good” and said should be consumed in two to twelve years, he is said to admit in a letter to Agostini: “I have never tasted it.”

Agostini accuses him of repeating the same recommendations year after year without bothering to check or up-date them. The biography also claims that Parker often contradicts himself as he copies sections of one guide into another. Château du Glana in Bordeaux, for example, is described as “unanimously appreciated” and then as “sometimes good, sometimes dull”.

But the most serious allegation in the biography is that Parker has reneged on his commitment to avoid cosy friendships with winemakers.

She recounts a meal with the Bordeaux producer Jean-Bernard Delmas, in New York, where they and other guests drank 23 prestigious bottles. She also alleges that Parker gave a high mark to Château Quinault a few weeks after he had dined with its maker, Alain Raynaud. Mr Raynaud had asked a judge in Bordeaux to ban her book until the sections on him have been removed. “Maybe this work is just a form of vengeance,” he said.

But a judge last night threw out the case, and Mr Reynauld is now considering whether or not to appeal.

Gérard Perse, the owner of Château Pavie in Saint-Émilion, said: “We should put up a statue of him in Bordeaux. Robert Parker is a great professional, a man of integrity.”

Jane MacQuitty on wine

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