Parker's Wine Guide

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Parker's Wine Guide (English original title: " Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide ") is a wine guide published by Robert M. Parker , the world's leading wine critic, and Pierre-Antoine Rovani .

In this guide, Parker makes a selection that, according to his own statements, corresponds to North American tastes. As a result, the focus is on France , Italy and North America, especially California . Spain , the largest wine country in Europe in terms of acreage, is treated relatively modestly , as is Portugal . Otherwise, only Germany and Austria are taken into account in European viticulture , but only marginally. Eastern and Southeastern Europe with historically interesting and old wine-growing regions like Hungary and Greece are not mentioned at all. Australia is covered in some detail. Parker dedicates a few pages to Chile , Argentina , New Zealand and South Africa .

From a Central European perspective, this imbalance can be explained as follows: Central European viticulture includes, in terms of grape varieties, etc. as a typical white wine- growing region and historically also Alsace , which is treated in the wine literature and thus also by Parker under France. Alsace with a cultivation area of ​​approx. 12,500 hectares is now dealt with in detail on almost 100 pages and rated highly, while Germany (a good 100,000 hectares of cultivation area) and Austria (50,000 hectares of cultivation area) each have only 12 pages. With regard to Germany, the winegrowers are rated from ***** to **, as in the other countries, but not a single wine is rated with a number of points. The result is better for Austria, where some wines score over 90 out of 100 Parker points . In general, Parker takes a very critical view of the quality of red wines in Central Europe, i.e. Alsace, Germany and Austria.

It may be that there tends to be more large winemakers in Alsace, but this glaring disproportion can only be explained by a specifically North American perspective, which essentially limits the importance of his work in European terms to the red wines of France and Italy and the white wines of Alsace .