So much is going on. The boards are vibrating. There is revolt in Robert Parker's Wine Advocate land. Pierre Antoine Rovani, who has earned no following, is out. No loss there. I have had limited contact with Rovani. I found him to be a fairly insulting kind of guy. And, he didn’t have anything going on in the palate-wise to allow him to be smug.
Rovani's words and lack of understanding of wine will be missed. We don't have him to kick around anymore.
Antonio Galloni, who created the Piedmont Report newsletter two years ago, is covering Italy.
David Schildknecht, who has written for Parker has quit his job and will be taking on a wine tasting territory of biblical proportions. The poor man will be responsible for Champagne, Germany, Austria, Central Europe and All of America west of Oregon, Alsace, the Loire Valley, the Languedoc-Roussillon, and Burgundy. This is bad news for Loire wine lovers because David is purported to have a palate and he might actually cover the red wines of the Loire favorably. (You know, driving prices up, even more competition for the wines, etc.) On the other hand, he might lose all understanding for subtley. According to the AMA, afterall, palate-fatigue resulting in the Parker Palate Syndrome, is a possible side effect of hyper-tasting. I hope he has a contract for pots of dough.
Parker will still rule over Bordeaux, California, the Rhône Valley and Provence.
According to Howard Goldberg’s story for Decanter Magazine, Mr. P. will be appointing a ‘critic-at-large' for the erobertparker.com site. This critic will be, "a prolific writer who will provide remarkable diversity and expertise, and will represent a point of view outside the American perspective that now dominates this site.”
Between you and me, I think it’s going to be either Goldberg himself Joe Dressner (joedressner.com). I mean who else could it possibly be? Actually, I think Parker is just going to shake everything up. It's Dressner.
These events have been so distracting that I forgot what I tuned in to write. And I won't really get into it right now, but I want to talks about yeast.
A new yeast was approved for the harvest 2005. It’s a genetically modified little number called the ML01. I knew this was in the works but an article was just written about it in the Sacramento Bee. I was pretty surprised no one else picked it up. According to that article by Jim Downing, a few brands made with the yeast will be reaching the stores in 2006. Yum.
