PARKER, JR., was at the zenith of his career and power. In the 1980s he had forged his reputation, opening up a new world to consumers and trumpeting a kind of criticism that woke up winemakers everywhere. In the 1990s he had staked out and extended his influence across the world’s winelands, enlarging the market for fine wine and in the process financially benefiting many château owners, growers, and wineries. Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, he found himself an American icon, which meant, of course, that he had become a brand name. The world of wine seemed to wax with his enthusiasms. On his annual visit to Bordeaux in late March, Parker was particularly exultant over the 2000 vintage, which had lived up to all his hopes and expectations as the millennium millésime. He had to pull out all the stops and ransack his bag of adjectives to describe the swashbuckling opulence of the wines, which rivaled the magnificence of the 1982s. The tone had already been set, but it was much more enthusiastic after the publication of his April issue, in which he called the vintage monumental, the “greatest year ever for Bordeaux,”
