At first glance, it may seem that I am obsessed, with some parkeromania, or parkerophobia, as who prefers, well, because the glass could be half empty, or half full. On the one hand, moreover, it is a mania, although an attentive reader will also find here some elements of phobia. A normal human being would not glue to one name, like a tick of some kind. Such a comparison with a tick makes sense here because after attaching to, I drink all available juices.
It’s like this. I recognise in Robert Parker Jr the undeniable genius, even in the mistakes he made, like all of us. In the fact of being a genius, I notice, however, a unique concentration of his time, society with advantages and disadvantages, still visible, because the monument has not managed to crystallise and cool down. Besides, it is a monument so distant that in my place on earth, they allow me to write about it. Frankly, there will be politics in the conclusions, because where there are opinions and society, politics is also there, and it isn’t easy to forget about it.
Writing so far about some wines and plonk, at some point I realised how idiotic was what I dealt with, wasting my precious time. I keep saying that the evaluation and description of particular wines belong to marketing, and I have no connection with it. So it’s time to take care of what’s been going on in my head for a few years, from the moment I felt that I was living in a world that escaped me and that I couldn’t understand. Writing about wine has become an uneasy activity for me, but it has put me at an impossible contradiction.
That’s when I started exploring parkerology and felt the wind in the wings, as in some particular way it combined my interests in Marx, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Fukuyama and Greta Thurnberg, Ortega y Gasset, as well as the phobias of my friend Sigismund, which means in all that is around me as I am a participant in the present day. Also, I should add here Wojciech Bońkowski, Jancis Robinson, Tim Atkin, Jesse Pinkman and Walt White and many others who helped (and continue to help) me to understand what was floating in the bottle. For me, Robert Parker Jr became the culmination of a dome, a shooting act of faith in all that is subjective and unique (because embedded in culture) in human being. So when I write about Parker, I throw pebbles into the pond to make patient readers clear of how moving sands we’re treading, clinging to opinions and ratings.
Next to the real world of stones, trees, cats, dogs, mice and birds, we live in an imaginary world. All these canons, borders, opinions, ideas, beautiful sentences and their grammatical descriptions, all this human world exists only in our heads. It goes away into the non-existent with each of us. Looking at Robert Parker Jr, I look at how something comes out of nothing to build more values in the minds of many. This not at all a modest wine critic, who moved the body of the winey world, deserving respect not because of the imaginary scale he invented. It is, on the one hand, a purely pedagogical example of what a conscious individual can come to and, on the other hand, a mirror in which his society reflects together with what happened to all of us in recent decades.
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