The origins of The Wine Advocate can be traced back to as far as 1967, when Robert M. Parker Jr. took a brief break from American college life to make his first trip to France on the heels of a young lady friend who was studying in Alsace. That lady was soon to become Mrs. Patricia Parker and remains so to this day. Apart from getting the girl, Parker had discovered wine during this first trip to France and developed a taste for it, which quickly turned into an obsession. In the mid to late 1960s, the concept of The Wine Advocate was just a twinkle in Robert Parker’s eyes, but one that his friends and family, bent on him becoming a lawyer, discouraged as fanciful. He graduated from University of Maryland School of Law in 1973 and joined a firm as a practicing lawyer near where he and his young wife had grown up, in Baltimore Maryland. But his professional heart was already lost to wine, and in 1978 Parker decided to put his money where his mouth was and began publishing his own wine guide, The Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate.
In the early 1970s, when Parker was conceiving of writing his own wine guide, he was taken with the work of Ralph Nader, an American political activist who sought to "out" corporate and political corruption by challenging compromised propaganda. Parker recognized that much of what was then being written about wine was compromised by the financial agendas of many of the famous wine writers of the day. He dreamt of a publication that could be free of financial ties to wineries and merchants, a guide that would produce wholly unbiased views on wines and that served only the interests of wine consumers. This would be a magazine that would be funded purely by subscribers-the people that buy, read and use it. And so, The Wine Advocate started and remains true to this day.
In 1979, the name of Robert Parker’s magazine was changed to The Wine Advocate. In 1983, Parker’s controversial glowing reviews of the 1982 Bordeaux vintage, tasted from barrels in the wineries, created a stir among most other major wine writers who felt the vintage was too ripe and the wines wouldn’t age. When Parker turned out to be right about the greatness of this vintage, his reputation and subscriber base soared. By 1984 he was able to leave his law career to focus on The Wine Advocate and wine full-time.
Today, Robert Parker Wine Advocate has subscribers in every state in the United States, and in more than 40 countries throughout the wine world. Virtually every knowledgeable observer agrees that The Wine Advocate exerts the most significant influence on the serious wine consumer’s buying habits and trends not only in America but also in France, England, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, China and every other major wine market of the world.
