Wine Chat 003: Parker v. Galloni, and the Loosening Grip of Traditional Wine Critics’ Influence

As we’re making our way through edits for this week’s podcast, we did a Wine Chat/Mini-cast to fill in. This is on a very important issue that I think is going to shake up the wine critic world permanently. Kind of a big deal. Here’s a link to the Decanter.com story that covered this: Parker v. Galloni If you don’t want to read it, here’s the short of the story: Famed American critic Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate, who single-handedly sets prices and makes reputations for wines and who has arguably changed the way winemakers make wine so they can garner high scores,  sold a large portion of his brand to a group of Singapore investors and shook up the structure of the subscription-only newsletter. His named successor for evaluating California wine, Antonio Galloni, stepped down after the move and started his own Web site. He decided to withhold all the scores for Sonoma wines he had conducted prior to the sale, stating that he would publish [...]