By Mike Steinberger
Posted Friday, March 9, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET
Cleopatra supposedly crushed an astronomically expensive pearl in a glass of wine and drank it just to prove how rich Egypt was. These days, depending on the wine, you can leave the pearl out and still drink something like Egypt's GDP. The most sought-after wines are getting remarkably expensive. Some 2005 red Burgundies are selling for double and even triple the prices they commanded in other recent, highly regarded vintages. The 2003 versions of E. Guigal's fabled single-vineyard Côte-Rôties have been offered at $800 per bottle, nearly quadruple what the firm's 2000s and 2001s are selling for and a third more than its equally lauded 1999s are currently fetching. Prices for the 2000 Bordeaux First Growths and their Right Bank equivalents have about doubled in just the last two and a half years, several 2003s have done likewise, and prices for the still-unreleased 2005s are already vertiginous.
Why the dramatic run-up? It's chiefly a function of supply and demand—as newly enriched Americans, Russians, and Asians are embracing oenophilia, the increased demand is pushing prices for the most desired wines skyward. They are making the fine-wine market a lot frothier than it might otherwise be, and their purchases are almost entirely dictated by the scores doled out by Robert Parker and a few other critics. Parker, who pioneered the 100-point rating scale, has long railed against using wine for either investment or show-and-tell purposes. Yet, through no fault of his, the 100-point system is now the engine driving these very activities. Is it time for him to deep-six the points?
As the critic who conceived the 100-point system, Parker has a special obligation to recognize that it's now serving some very regrettable purposes, and given his reputation and his success, he is uniquely positioned to do something about it.
What might he do? He could stop issuing ratings entirely—or just drop them for Bordeaux, where they have the greatest impact. He might switch from points to letter grades. Because these correlate to a range of scores, they are slightly more defensible than single-number ratings, which suggest a level of precision that simply doesn't exist when it comes to evaluating wines. Equally important, single-number ratings—particularly numbers between 95 and 100—lend themselves to speculation and trophy hunting in a way that a range of scores, or its alphabetic equivalent, probably would not.
None of these changes would reverse the overall trend—fine wine is becoming a luxury good, and that cork can't be put back in the bottle. However, they might make a difference at the margins. Doing this would, at the very least, carry enormous symbolic weight: What better way of reproaching speculators and trophy hunters than to deprive them of the all-important number? And who knows: Scrapping some ratings might even convince retailers and consumers that ratings can be dispensed with entirely. True, asking wine lovers to imagine a world without the 100-point scale is like asking them to imagine a world without the Gregorian calendar or the QWERTY keyboard. Thanks mainly to Parker, a generation of oenophiles has been nurtured on the point system; if he were to now start weaning the public of its dependence on scores, it might be his greatest contribution yet.