Read an Excerpt
The Emperor of Wine
The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste
By Elin McCoy HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 Elin McCoy
All right reserved. ISBN: 0060093684
Chapter One
An American Palate In Formation
Onkton, Maryland, population 4,615, seems an unlikely hometown for the world's most important wine critic. When Robert McDowell Parker, Jr., was born in Baltimore on July 23, 1947, the landscape north of the city around Monkton was much as it is now -- a typical rural American mix of working dairy farms, white clapboard farmhouses and modest brick ranch houses, and patches of second-growth woods and rolling fields. As I drove to his house to spend a day with him, though, a few large, white-fenced horse farms alerted me to the presence of the affluent elite of huntcountry blue bloods who have long presided over point-to-point horse races each spring and fall and attended the annual Blessing of the Hounds at the local Episcopal church.
But Parker didn't grow up on one of those grand estates, where the occasional bottle of wine may have graced the table evei back in the 1940s and 1950s. His parents married at eighteen and never went to college. For the first few years of his life, home was the family dairy farm in Monkton, only a 10-minute drive from where he lives today. Some of the first smells to hit his now famous nose were fresh milk, cows in the barn, and hay warm from the sun.
Three hundred years ago, when barrels of Bordeaux wines like Château Haut-Brion and Château Margaux were being regularly auctioned off in London, Monkton and all of northern Baltimore County was still the domain of the Susquehannock and Piscataway Indian tribes. In 1634 it was granted to the king's representative, Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, who founded Maryland and leased thousands of acres to settlers before giving a choice parcel that included Monkton to his fourth wife. Besides dairy farming and creameries, grist- and sawmills were the earliest industries here, now long gone; the old stone mills survived as antique shops and homes. Back in the 1950s, when Parker was growing up, Monkton and neighboring Parkton (where he now lives) were mere clusters of houses and churches; Monkton had only a tiny food market, no library or dry cleaner, and the nearest drugstore was 15 miles away.
Today the town is bigger, encompassing all-American nondescript shopping plazas with supermarkets as their centerpieces; a main street with the standard town businesses-banks, pizzerias, auto repair shops. and garden centers; and a bland brick high school set in a field with a sign that reads Hereford High School, Home of the Bulls. This wasn't a fine wine and food place in the 1950s, and it still isn't, despite the growing number of "executive-style" development homes and the presence of two tiny wineries a few miles away. The distance to Baltimore is only 27 miles but must have seemed farther before Interstate 83 was built, linking the city to points north.
Forget the wide range of gourmet staples urban Americans take for granted. The store nearest Parker's house in Parkton turned out to be just a country place with an old-fashioned Drink Coca-Cola sign and out front, a barrel of cabbage flowers edged with American flags. The local give-away paper has ads for popular wines he ignores, like Beringer White Zinfandel, and lists of tree farms where you can cut your own for Christmas. The score of the latest Hereford Bulls basketball game is the big news.
Parker's childhood was a typical one in small-town America of the 1950s, which meant that food was plentiful but unimportant. His mom's kitchen repertoire was unsophisticated farm cooking of the meat loaf and fried chicken variety, but apart from her wonderful banana cream and lemon meringue pies, Parker remembers having no particular opinion about what appeared on the family table. Wine was never served; the beverages of choice were milk, soda, or coffee, and the occasional cocktail. As a teenager Parker wasn't the least interested when his father, Robert Sr., who drank Bourbon and loved inhaling its rich scent, held out a glass and suggested, "Oh, you should smell this?" And when Robert Sr., an enthusiastic hunter who kept bluetick hounds, told Robert Jr. on a hunting trip that you could tell the breed of a dog by its smell, the boy thought he was joking. Only much later in life did he realize that his father had an unusually acute sense of smell, and that he had inherited this same ability.
It was a happy childhood steeped in the middle-class normalcy of riding bikes, roughhousing with the family cocker spaniels, playing soccer, hanging out with friends, and enjoying the security of a stay-at-home mom, Ruth "Siddy" Parker, who never left her only child with a baby-sitter and didn't work outside the home until he was in college. When he was four his father gave up the dairy farm, the family moved a few miles to a newly built ranch house, and Robert "Buddy" Parker, Sr., went to work selling construction site equipment for a Baltimore-based oil company, eventually becoming a vice president. He traveled extensively for his job, but Bob Jr. didn't go much farther than Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and once by train to New York City. This cluster of towns in northern Baltimore County, now known as the Hereford zone, was his world.
A soccer star in high school -- he twice made the all-county team as goalie -- Parker was popular, handsome, and easygoing, with the boundless energy that would one day carry him through marathon wine tastings and 12- to 14-hour days visiting vineyards. His intensity, competitive spirit, and fierce determination emerged on the athletic field, where, his mother once observed, "he'd kill himself to win." During one faculty-student soccer game, he was carried off the field and rushed to the hospital with caved-in ribs and bruised lungs after a teacher butted him in the chest ...
Continues...
Excerpted from The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy Copyright © 2005 by Elin McCoy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
