There is new leadership in one of the world’s leading wine publications, and a new reviewer covering Napa Valley wines.
But don’t expect a radical transformation from Robert Parker Wine Advocate, the 43-year-old publication that rates wines on a 100-point scale. Its new senior editor said the digital magazine’s core mission to be an independent and trusted shopping guide will not change.
The new editor-in-chief is Joe Czerwinski, previously the site’s managing editor. He succeeds Lisa Perrotti-Brown, who ran the Wine Advocate for eight years, and will also take over the rhythm of Napa wine.
British wine critic William Kelley, who takes over as deputy editor, is also promoted. It is not known what Perrotti-Brown will do next.
Personnel changes, especially on wine websites, are rarely newsworthy. But within the world of wine, what Wine Advocate does is important. Since its inception in the 1970s, as a newsletter produced by a moonlighting Maryland attorney, it has been a gravitational center of how people think about wine, most notably popularizing the 100-point scoring system now used in many publications and is visible in wine stores. shelves all over the world. Today, the subscription site is owned by Michelin, famous tire and food guide fame, and employs eight wine critics who publish wine reviews as well as old reports, blog posts, travel articles, and more.
In a conversation this week, Czerwinski (who I worked with once on another post, Wine Enthusiast) discussed where he thinks the Wine Advocate is now and where he sees it under his tutelage. Rather than signaling big changes, he emphasized a vision of continuity, articulating the ways in which Wine Advocate has retained its founding principles even through the tumult of recent years: the retirement of founder Robert Parker and a series of ownership changes that resulted in as a result the total acquisition in 2019.
“I guess we’re pretty old-fashioned,” Czerwinski said. “We see ourselves as the independent consumer’s guide to buying wine. That’s why we exist. That core mission hasn’t changed at all.”
Also largely unchanged, despite his departure, is the continued use of Parker’s name. The power of the stars, apparently, is too great. “Bob’s name attached to the property gives it more meaning, more value,” Czerwinski said. “There have been times when I’ve heard someone say, ‘The Wine Advocate, what is that?’ And you say it’s Robert Parker and they say, ‘oh, of course.’
However, increasingly, attachment to Parker can be a double-edged sword. He is without doubt the most famous wine critic of all time, a name whose recognition transcends this niche. But during his career, Parker and his palate, often regarded as favored by lush and hedonistic wines, became so influential that he also became the reigning power against which new voices rebelled. More than a few writers and sommeliers have defined their entire careers in opposition to Parker, positioning their palates as different from his. One of them, natural wine advocate Alice Feiring, captioned a book “How I Saved the World from Parkerization.”
It makes sense that Michelin, whose food guide is equally criticized for preferring lush and hedonistic restaurants, is leaning on the Parker association. But as much as that connection may elevate the Wine Advocate brand, there is always the possibility that it will alienate wine drinkers who have internalized some of the anti-Parker rhetoric.
However, if you look closely, the current reality of the Wine Advocate is much more nuanced than the typical dialogue surrounding Parker’s palate. There is a perception, for example, that Wine Advocate is categorically against natural wine. (Understandably: Parker, once a prolific tweeter, call it an “undefined scam” and a “fraud”). However, in a recent article, Czerwinski named an organic Shiraz, with no added sulfur, as one of his five favorite wines of the year.
When I expressed my surprise at this, Czerwinski told me that he was in favor of the idea of low intervention winemaking. “It would be difficult to find someone who doesn’t think the idea is a good one,” he said. “We are dogmatic about quality. We are not dogmatic about how we get there.”
This year, Wine Advocate also introduced search filters for organic and biodynamic wines to its database of wine ratings (around 450,000 entries) and introduced the Green Emblem, an award program to recognize wineries that have reached remarkable levels. of ecological sustainability. Those moves read like an olive branch of sorts to younger drinkers, who have shown a keen interest in buying wine based on environmental factors than the older generations who have historically formed Wine Advocate’s subscriber base.
The other subscriber base that Wine Advocate, in fact all of Michelin, would like to reach is Asia, where there is a growing interest in fine wine. “If you look at China, that’s a huge market that we have not taken advantage of at all at Robert Parker,” Czerwinski said. “It probably won’t happen tomorrow,” but the long-term play will likely include a lot of wine and food events there.
No doubt the Napa Valley wine establishment will be keeping a close eye on Czerwinski, now that he’s the assigned reviewer to taste and rate their wines. For most of his career, he has focused on regions like southern France, New Zealand and Australia, though he said he visited Napa many times and participated in some group Napa wine tastings early in his Wine Enthusiast career.
A New York resident, Czerwinski won’t be the only wine critic covering Napa wines from around the country. James Molesworth, who analyzes the region for the other leading wine magazine, Wine Spectator, also lives in New York. (Both Perrotti-Brown and Molesworth’s predecessor James Laube live in Napa.) Czerwinski said he hopes to come to Napa several times a year, for a few weeks at a time, to test new releases at the wineries.
A principle that Wine Advocate will not change: the centrality of the 100-point scale for rating wines.
It is a system that has come under immense scrutiny for the past two decades; The question of whether it is outdated, irrelevant and offensively reductive is still a favorite topic of many wine bloggers. When I asked Czerwinski to defend him, he first expressed amused outrage. “Does it really need to be defended?” he said, but then proceeded to do so.
“The scores are a shorthand that represents how much or how little the critic liked the wine,” Czerwinski said. “He does it in a way that is instantly and, for most people, intuitively recognizable.”
For me, that has always been the most persuasive argument in its favor: that you don’t need to know complicated wine jargon to understand that a 95 point wine is good. As a rating tool, it is accessible. It is democratic. And perhaps that ideal, of being a simple and universally intelligible shopping guide, will finally lead Wine Advocate into a new era of success.