23 Rules of the Office Holiday Party

20th Century Fox Film Corp/Everett Collection

Tom Hanks descends the staircase in an all-white tuxedo in 'Big.'

You may ask yourself: What's a story about the company holiday party doing in the sports section? Excellent question! It is hard to compare the annual workplace December celebration with, say, the Olympics, unless the Olympics have a competition for eating too much cheese and sugar cookies while listening to Mariah Carey.

But a company holiday party is indeed a sport. Think about it! You worry if you're prepared. You worry about the venue. You panic about your outfit, like a nervous Tom Hanks descending the staircase in an all-white tuxedo in the movie "Big." You wonder if someone—the boss?—is keeping score. You stay on your feet. You dance. You sweat. You drink plenty of fluids…or at least vodka. The next morning, you'll probably be hurting.

We're about to dive straight into the office holiday party season. Here's how to survive an epic night of company cheer:

1. There are two types of company holiday parties. There are company holiday parties in which employees bring their spouses or significant others and perhaps their adorable little kids, and then there are the company holiday parties in which employees typically go alone. Friends and family parties end promptly at 9 p.m. and everyone gets home safely. Employees-only company parties usually last 36 hours and result in at least six people being reported as missing.

2. It's OK to be the first person at the company holiday party. Just don't be the last person at the company holiday party.

3. For the last time: that little pastry hors d'oeuvre being passed around on a tray? It's stuffed with cheese and mushroom. You've been going to the same company holiday party for the past seven years and it's always been cheese and mushroom. Stop asking.

4. The company holiday party is not the moment to try Jagermeister or walking on your hands for the first time.

5. If your company's holiday party is taking place in a swanky penthouse with piles of lobster, expensive champagne, trapeze artists and Coldplay performing live on stage, immediately run back to the office and clear out your desk, because your company is declaring bankruptcy tomorrow.

6. The five scariest words anyone can say at the company holiday party: "Sure, I can totally DJ!"

7. If you see the company CEO at the holiday party, walk right up and give the boss a 90-minute, detailed lecture on all of the things you would do differently if you were the boss. Highly encouraged! All CEOs love a good unsolicited 90-minute lecture.

8. Counting calories? Here's an easy office-party diet tip. Before going to the party, drink one glass of water and eat a banana and a handful of raw almonds. It will fill your stomach, and you will only wind up eating 94 crab cakes, 47 mini egg rolls, 54 nachos, 18 ounces of cheese, a leg of lamb, 11 brownies and four ice cream sandwiches—plus a glass of water, a banana and a handful of raw almonds.

9. If you work in a company with an art department, just know the people in the art department have more fun than anybody. They have expensive haircuts and cooler shoes, and after the company party, they're going to a better party, and you're absolutely not invited.

10. Yup: It really is called a Pig in a Blanket and don't think too hard about it or it will completely weird you out.

11. Everybody sees you hanging out all night at the shrimp bar eating shrimp. You're not that slick.

12. Unless you have two hours to spare talking about the BCS championship, avoid anyone at the office who went to Notre Dame or Alabama.

13. Dancing at the office holiday party is a bold move—though not as bold as dancing by yourself at the office holiday party.

14. If you used to be a decent break dancer "back in the day," and "the day" was sometime during the Reagan administration, you might want to reconsider hitting the floor.

15. If your company holiday party is a karaoke party, do yourself a favor. Get a co-worker, spend $2,000 on a vocal coach, take six weeks of lessons and master Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Islands in the Stream." It will be a smash hit, you will both become office legends and will probably get promoted the next day.

16. Whoa, you just went to the buffet table and made a sandwich out of two gingerbread cookies and six slices of roast beef. Nice job.

17. If you're showing co-workers videos of your cat on your iPhone, it's time to hail a cab home.

18. If you think you're showing co-workers videos of your cat on your iPhone, and it turns out they aren't your co-workers, and you've accidentally gone to another company's company holiday party, it is definitely time to hail a cab home.

19. Yes, you can expense the cab home. Expensing the two stolen cases of wine in the trunk might be trickier.

20. No, you don't need to go to the underground disco after the company holiday party. That's for the employees 25 and under and they're already freaked out that you're in the car with them and demanding to hear Phil Collins.

21. There's always someone who tells you all week they're going to "take it easy and drink only water" at this year's holiday party. At 9:15 p.m., you will look over, and this person will be passed out atop a giant pile of winter coats.

22. French fries at 4:15 a.m. are your best friend in the world.

23. If you come to work the next morning and discover you have 153 messages on your voice mail and a note from human resources: Just go to Starbucks and hide until New Year's Day.

Write to Jason Gay at jason.gay@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Dec. 10, 2012, on page B8 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 23 Rules of the Holiday Party.

Eight Questions for Rick Smolan About The Human Face Of Big Data – AllThingsD

If you work anywhere near anything that might be described as “Big Data,” and have ever had trouble explaining to someone you care about why what you do matters, the obvious gift to give this holiday season is “The Human Face of Big Data.”

Weighing in at 7.5 pounds, it is an ambitious, jaw-dropping effort helmed by former Time, Life and National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan — he of “Day In the Life” series of photography books as well as “America At Home,” America 24/7 and “24 Hours in Cyberspace,” the book attempts and largely succeeds at demystifying a the nebulous question: What is Big Data?

It was exactly the question that Smolan was asking when he first hit upon the idea for the big while attending the D9 conference in 2011. Hearing the phrase “Big Data” uttered in so many conversations, he had no idea what it meant. Asking at first yielded unclear answers, and yet he persisted, eventually landing on the idea.

Today the book is landing on the desks of world leaders, dignitaries and other notable people around the world: Among those on the list: President Obama, the Dalai Lama, Pope Benedict XVI and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, but also Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Daniel Tunkelang chief data scientist at LinkedIn and actor Robin Williams. Among the images they’ll see upon opening it is the blended image of 1,400 different shots of New York’s Times Square taken over 15 hours at right. In a word, Big Data is about people: What they do, where they go, who they know and so on. The stories about how data, once harnessed solves problems and in some ways creates new ones is its overarching theme.

There’s also a smart phone app for iPhone and Android that is launching today. It’s an interactive viewer app from Aurasma that aims to bring the book’s content to life by access to videos and animations by pointing the camera at images on certain pages flagged within the book. On top of that there’s an iPad app that costs $2.99, and which enables readers to take a deeper dive with some of the stories with videos, charts and animated infographics.

I talked with Smolan about the book yesterday by phone after spending more than a few hours perusing an advance copy over the weekend. Here’s a little of what we talked about.

AllThingsD: So where’d you get the idea for a book on Big Data? It’s a phrase that doesn’t necessarily jump out to me as part of a title of a bestseller?

Smolan: I was at D: All Things Digital in 2011, and I kept hearing the phrase Big Data and I kept asking people what it meant because I felt stupid and because it sounded like one of those marketing phrases. The first person I talked to said “It’s so much information it won’t sit on your personal computer.” Well that wasn’t very interesting. The next one said it “It’s taking information from one place and overlapping it with information from another and finding these patterns.” And that wasn’t interesting either. The third person said “It’s like watching the planet grow a nervous system.” And that sounded interesting. Basically we’re seeding the world with low-cost sensors, and we’ve all become sensors with our cell phones. And instead of doing random samplings, we can almost survey every single person on the planet in realtime, where they are, what they’re doing, how fast they’re going, what they’re spending money on. The ability to gather that information, process it, visualize it, and then respond to it while it’s still happening is something we’ve never had the ability to do before.

Some of the material in the book I’m familiar with. The first image I saw when I opened it was one I recognized from MIT’s Sensable City Lab and I also recognize Big Data anecdotes from IBM like the one where they harnessed medical data to detect infections in premature infants. In this way it seems it’s a little different from your previous books.

It’s sort of a combination of original photography and curation. I think that putting all the information in one place and weaving it together, with these wonderful essays that I think are just as strong as the pictures. I’ve been getting notes from people like Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey saying that this is the first time they’ve had something that helps them explain how important this is. Amazon called last week to say they sold out of copies of the book on the first day and people were ordering 50 or 60 copies at a time, which has never happened ever to any book I’ve done in 25 years. They were dumbfounded. The hard thing about the book world is that you never know whether 10 people or a million people will find it interesting. A lot of people have never heard about Big Data and the ones who have, have a lot of trouble explaining it to other people. So I’m hoping that this will become the thing the people who know give to their parents or their family as a way of saying “this is why what I do is important.”

Obviously you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about all this during the last year, and you’ve probably been asked a million times if you think this is all creepy or intrusive in some way. Is it?

I’m an optimist. Every new tool can be used for good or evil. The whole point of doing this project is to start a conversation about it all. The people who are thinking most about Big Data right now are corporations and governments. I’d like to broaden the conversation and I hope the book makes some kind of contribution. I’m worried that the only ones profiting from it right now are corporations. As individuals we have very little say about how our data is being used. I’m not worried about the privacy implications of it so much. But it seems to me that as an individual, if I’m the one generating the data, I should have some kind of say in how it’s going to be used.

Did you have a particular favorite anecdote or photograph?

I just came back from Australia, and they have this expression down there: Gobsmacked. I think a lot of the pictures in the book convey that feeling. There are some that are funny, some that are just thought-provoking. There’s the case of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) that creates these incredibly detailed satellite maps for governments. They found there were villages in Nigeria, which has the highest rate of polio resurgence in the world. There are villages there that have never shown up on any map, no one in the government knew they were there. ESRI can recognize the shape of huts and pathways. The Gates Foundation has been trying to eradicate polio in places like Nigeria, and they have a very big effort there. They took they satellite maps and handed out 10,000 GPS-enabled cell phones to polio workers. They could see where they were in real time, and make sure they got to each of the houses. We spent a week travelling with the polio workers watching them do their work. I think the idea of using satellites to help cure polio is a pretty interesting concept.

You have a lot of examples where understanding of Big Data is saving lives, which I think will surprise some people who don’t initially see it as having direct benefits for real people. What are some others?

There’s the case of the recent earthquake in Japan. I heard a fascinating story by Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace Radio about how 43 seconds before the shaking actually began, all the bullet trains and factories in Japan stopped running. It was all automated. That country spent 15 years and half a billion dollars to build the system that automated all of this. Obviously the devastation was horrible, but the system worked. Then I read about a group of engineers in Palo Alto had created a program called Quake Catcher that uses the accelerometer in your laptop. Its the part in your laptop that detects when it’s been dropped and quickly moves the head on the drive drive before it smashes to the ground. It uses the same acceleromter to detect earthquakes. If it senses vibration and sees the same pattern over a 30-mile area, that’s an Earthquake. On one side of the page, you have this huge half-billion dollar project, hardwired, dedicated parts that have to be replaced, lots of engineering time. And on the other you have this free ubiquitous crowsourced, mobile sensor system that has no profit motivaiton, and no cost. I love it’s a delightful story of people doing this to help each other. And the data just underpins it all.

Is there anything in the book that has some practical, everyday value?

Yes. There’s the example of Shwetak Patel, he’s a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Washington. He found a way to detect every device in the home and measure how much power it’s using. Every month we get a bill from the power company and we just pay it, we don’t even ask what it’s about. He’s created a sensor that can be plugged in anywhere in the house that detects the unique digital signature of everything that’s drawing power in the house. Your computer, your toaster oven, whatever. I asked him if there was anything he had learned that would surprise the average American. He said it’s the DVR. The average American spends 11 percent of their monthly electrical bill on their DVR. It was designed in such a way that the hard drive never spins down, so even if you record only one show a week, it’s running the entire time and consuming power. So instead of drilling another oil well or burning more coal you could reduce America’s power bill by 5 percent just be redesigning the DVR. So many stories have this sense of delight: The data has been there all along, it’s just that no one was paying attention to it.

You’ve also done an iPad and smart phone apps to enhance with the book. What can you tell me about that?

I don’t know that anyone has ever done this with a book like this before, but there’s a free app you can download to your smart phone. Some of the pictures in the book have this little yellow key symbol in the corner. When you have the app, and you point the app at the page, it launches the page in the app. There are videos, there are Ted Talks. I think there are 22 or 23 videos. There’s an animated version a story about pizza delivery guys in Midtown Manhattan. There’s also an iPad app, the profits from which go to Charity: water, which is a nonprofit that’s working on bringing safe drinking water to people in developing nations. My goal here is to keep people turning the pages.

What do you want people to be left with in the end?

There’s an essay toward the back of the book called “Data Driven” by Jonathan Harris that has a really interesting thought. It’s that there is a relatively small group of people who are living in cities like San Francisco and New York, are mainly between the ages of 22 and 35, who are having an outsized effect on the rest of the human species. The kinds of societal changes that used to be the result of wars and famines are being brought about through software. …What I like about the essay is that EMC, which funded the book, had no right of review. I said took them that this book wasn’t going to be all about cheerleading Big Data as the solution to all our problems. I said it was also going to sound a cautionary note because I think that right now that governments and corporations are the ones having conversations about Big Data and that the average person isn’t. But it can have an effect on so many things in our lives from our credit rating and our ability to get hired and our ability to do lots of things. I think it’s really important that we have this conversation now.

How to Rebuild Trust — and Infrastructure

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Over the course of this campaign, commentators on both sides of the political divide seemed to agree on one point: this was a campaign about nothing. Barack Obama’s supporters wanted him to lay out a detailed and ambitious agenda for his second term. Mitt Romney’s fans wanted to hear more about the radical restructuring of government. But in fact, by the standards of most elections, this was a campaign about something very big.

Obama and Romney presented two distinct visions of how to rebuild the American economy. Romney emphasized the need to cut taxes and spending and, in general, shrink government. Obama talked about core investments that would allow the country to compete in this century. (Both agreed, without being specific, that they would pursue their agenda while reducing the deficit.) This is not a trivial divide, and the fact that Obama won should have consequences.

(MORE: Obama’s Re-election Celebrated Around the World)

And yet it looks as if it won’t, because the partisan gridlock in Washington means that nothing gets done. A normal process of democratic legislation — each side making concessions to arrive at a compromise plan — has become impossible. Congressional Republicans, in particular, have decided that they would rather have the country be paralyzed than work with a President they have demonized.

Is there a way out? President Obama will have to try to find several — on a debt deal, immigration, energy. But perhaps the most pressing issue is also the one of greatest hope: infrastructure. Dealing with the larger challenges is important, but none of them will have an instant impact on the economy. A large push to rebuild America would. With economic growth still sluggish and unemployment in the construction industry at 11.4% — the highest of any field in the country — an ambitious effort in this area could yield immediate results.

In the long run, you cannot have robust growth without strong infrastructure. The U.S. has historically been world class in this regard. Only a decade ago we were ranked fifth in overall infrastructure by the World Economic Forum; today we have dropped to 25th. The American Society of Civil Engineers calculates that we have a $2 trillion backlog of repairs that must be done over the next five years to stay competitive.

Hurricane Sandy should give us a sense of urgency about these projects. Our crumbling levees, roads, subways and bridges are not just barriers to growth; they are dangers to our lives. We are simply not prepared for a world in which there will be sharp increases in hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and perhaps even earthquakes. We could use concern about these threats to build a new and more resilient system, including most vitally a new energy and information grid, so that we are protected from nature, resilient in hardship and poised for growth.

(VIDEO: TIME Explains: How Obama Won)

Properly done, such a program would also save billions. Before Katrina, the New Orleans water system was losing 30% of its treated water in leaky pipes. (Around the U.S., this percentage is about 25%.) A new system could be far more efficient and detect leaks almost instantly. In almost every area, new technologies would reduce waste in energy, water and time.

Infrastructure improvement is something many Republicans and Democrats agree on. On immigration, taxes and the budget, deals are not happening because conservatives and liberals are deeply divided. That’s not true on infrastructure. Republican Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Lindsey Graham along with Democratic Senator Mark Warner and others have co-sponsored John Kerry’s legislation to create a national infrastructure bank. It’s an innovative idea for a partnership between the public and private sectors, ensuring that government funds get leveraged and projects get chosen on merit rather than for political reasons and are then executed efficiently. Many European countries use one — with superb results.

In the first debate, Romney made a smart and eloquent case for caution with regard to government spending. He explained that he thought any new government spending should pass this test: “Is it worth borrowing from the Chinese to pay for it?” I would argue that a national bank to rebuild America and give it a 21st century infrastructure passes this test with flying colors. In fact, right now, people everywhere are willing to lend money to the U.S. at rates that are lower than at any point in history, so we wouldn’t need any particular generosity from the Chinese.

Is there a special tactic that might help bring Republicans along? Well, in his gracious speech on Wednesday morning after his re-election, Obama noted that he hoped to talk to Romney about ways they might work together. Why not ask Romney if he would be willing to spearhead this project? It would be an act of bipartisanship in the service of a national interest — and it might just begin to change the tenor of Washington for the next four years.

MORE: Lessons from Florida’s Electoral Gridlock

Drinking With Robert M. Parker Jr.

By LETTIE TEAGUE

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

HE DRINKS, HE SCORES | Robert M. Parker Jr. during lunch at his home

IT'S NOT often that a man achieves so much power that his name is transformed into an adjective, but that's exactly what happened with Robert M. Parker Jr., the famous wine critic. Mr. Parker is not only the most influential wine critic in the world, he has also inspired the creation of so-called Parkerized wines.

What is a Parkerized wine, anyway? I asked Mr. Parker, who was sitting across from me in his Maryland living room. (When I'd asked Mr. Parker if we might meet for a chat, he had suggested lunch at his house featuring crab cakes made by his wife, Pat.) "Well, it's not a word you'd find in Larousse," Mr. Parker said. But he added, more seriously, that "Parkerized" was a term generally employed in a negative fashion to describe a wine that was "oaky, alcoholic and bombastic—which I totally disagree with, by the way."

Mr. Parker believes that the more accurate definition of a "Parkerized" wine would be "one produced from previously underachieving vineyards whose winemakers got serious about creating a quality wine." After all, the 65-year-old Mr. Parker has spent his entire 30-year career championing talented winemakers who produce wines that outperform the standards of their country, their region and their peers.

Quite a few winemakers have become celebrities (not to mention millionaires) thanks to Mr. Parker's enthusiastic descriptions of their wines and the scores he awards them on his 100-point scale (on which the lowest score is 50). In fact, I'd argue that Mr. Parker's exuberant, multiparagraph descriptions in the Wine Advocate, his subscriber-only newsletter, are even more impactful than his numerical scores. (There are some 50,000 Wine Advocate newsletter subscribers, who pay $130 a year. There is also a separate website, eRobertParker.com.) Mr. Parker is an unabashed fan of deliciousness—his pleasure is practically palpable, his excitement truly infectious, even if it occasionally goes over the top.

“Pundits have long enjoyed lampooning Mr. Parker's exuberant verbiage.”

Indeed, pundits have long enjoyed lampooning Mr. Parker's verbiage, which can occasionally sound like a parody of itself. Here is Mr. Parker on the 2005 Harlan Estate, a cult Napa Cabernet: "The 2005 exhibits a gorgeous thick-looking ruby/purple color in addition to a beautiful nose of burning embers interwoven with crème de cassis, roasted meats, sweet black truffles and spring flowers…this cuvée seems to want to be both a Pauillac and a ripe vintage of La Mission Haut-Brion." It's an almost Shakespearean style of tasting note—and one no other wine writer has ever quite managed to pull off.

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

The lunch featured a salmon appetizer.

It's certainly not the sort of writing that one would associate with a former Farm Credit Bank attorney—Mr. Parker's job before he turned to wine criticism full-time. As the story goes (and it's one well familiar to serious wine drinkers), Mr. Parker was inspired by his hero, Ralph Nader, to become a consumer advocate for wine drinkers. When Mr. Parker began his newsletter in 1978 (initially titled the Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate), the wine trade was rife with cronyism and conflicts of interest. Leading wine writers were often engaged in selling the wines they wrote about, especially in the U.K.

Robert M. Parker Jr.'s Picks

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

The lunch featured three bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, including the 2009 Château de Beaucastel Vieilles Vignes.

• The greatest wine he has ever tasted: 1978 Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Mouline.
• The best Châteauneuf-du-Pape vintage: Either 2007 or 2010—'we will have to wait six to eight years to tell.'
• Wine-drinking life lesson: A glass of water for every glass of wine. Badoit, the French sparkling water, is Mr. Parker's favorite.

And their notes on wines were often florid if rather vague on particulars. "I often thought the Brits hedged their bets—they couldn't be held accountable because they didn't really say anything about the wines," said Mr. Parker. That was one reason he decided to employ the 100-point scoring system. At least that way he was "putting his stake in the ground."

Mr. Parker's other now-legendary point of distinction was his ringing endorsement of the 1982 Bordeaux vintage when every other wine critic dismissed both the wines and the vintage. Mr. Parker saw greatness—and he turned out to be right. The 1982 Bordeaux are still some of the most sought-after wines in the world. It was the turning point that put Mr. Parker enduringly on the wine map.

While he has been instrumental in determining the fortunes of wine producers in other regions, especially California and the Rhône, Bordeaux has been a particularly important region for Mr. Parker—and it's one of the regions that Mr. Parker still visits each year. (He has assigned deputies to cover the wines from most other parts of the world, including Burgundy, Italy, Germany, California and Washington state.)

When Mr. Parker assigned his deputy Antonio Galloni to review the wines of California last year, speculation among bloggers and writers was rife: Was Mr. Parker planning to retire? Did he have a replacement? Was he selling the Wine Advocate? And what would happen to the price of California wines, especially the pricier ones, if Mr. Parker weren't rating them? I put some of those questions to Mr. Parker that afternoon.

Mr. Parker gently shooed aside his bulldog Betty Jane (he's almost as impassioned about dogs as he is wine) and offered some semiconvincing assurances. "There is no apparent heir, although Antonio has the work ethic and the integrity to do it." But, he added, he had no intention of retiring. "I still work 12-, 14-hour days when I'm on the road," he said, though he no longer tastes hundreds of wines a day in his home office as he once did.

Mr. Parker said he has entertained offers to buy his newsletter over the years, including three from "hedge-fund guys," but so far he has refused them all, in part because he would not relinquish editorial control of the newsletter. And with that, Mr. Parker announced that lunch was almost ready—although there was time for a brief cellar tour.

The Parker cellar lies just below the kitchen floor and is accessed by a door decorated with a charming photo of the young Parkers: Pat Parker looked like a double for Natalie Wood, while Mr. Parker looked like Jack Nicholson in his prime. The Parker cellar, on the other hand, looked like nothing I've ever seen before. There were wooden cases of wine stacked all the way to the ceiling of the cellar—wines of impeccable pedigree and provenance, but in a bit of a perilous jumble. Mr. Parker assured me he knew where everything was, and besides, no one but him came down to the cellar. Pat hadn't visited "in years," he said.

Off Duty Fall Entertaining

Click to view a collection of fall-related food, travel and decorating articles from Off Duty.

I was flattered to have been granted admittance, if somewhat alarmed. "Watch the broken glass," Mr. Parker cautioned. He stood behind cases of first-growth Bordeaux and recounted that he recently found a case of 1982 La Fleur-Pétrus. "That increased my net worth," Mr. Parker said with a laugh. The cellar has about 10,000 bottles, by Mr. Parker's estimate. He will probably end up donating a good portion of it to charity one day, as his daughter, Maia, is of drinking age but prefers tequila to wine.

Upstairs, Pat Parker was ready with the crab cakes and Mr. Parker had three bottles open—all Châteauneuf-du-Papes, two reds and one white. The Parkers drink Rhône wines with most meals, although Mr. Parker is, surprisingly, a fan of simple Spanish whites, especially Godello and Albariño. "They've really had a quality revolution with Spanish whites," said Mr. Parker, who has also been known to drink a Tavel rosé or two—something the detractors of "Parkerized" wines would likely be surprised to find out.

The white Châteauneuf-du-Pape was the 2009 Château de Beaucastel Vieilles Vignes, "the best white I've had in the past year," said Mr. Parker, who proceeded—in a rapid, stream-of-consciousness fashion—to describe what he found in the wine: "honey, white flower, white apricot, marmalade—it's viscous but elegant."

"Slow down!" Pat said, laughing.

That's the one thing that Mr. Parker—who is still tasting and traveling, and now working on a memoir as well—doesn't seem able to do.

See Off Duty wine videos and more at youtube.com/wsj. Email Lettie at wine@wsj.com.

Drinking With Robert M. Parker Jr.

By LETTIE TEAGUE

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

HE DRINKS, HE SCORES | Robert M. Parker Jr. during lunch at his home

IT'S NOT often that a man achieves so much power that his name is transformed into an adjective, but that's exactly what happened with Robert M. Parker Jr., the famous wine critic. Mr. Parker is not only the most influential wine critic in the world, he has also inspired the creation of so-called Parkerized wines.

What is a Parkerized wine, anyway? I asked Mr. Parker, who was sitting across from me in his Maryland living room. (When I'd asked Mr. Parker if we might meet for a chat, he had suggested lunch at his house featuring crab cakes made by his wife, Pat.) "Well, it's not a word you'd find in Larousse," Mr. Parker said. But he added, more seriously, that "Parkerized" was a term generally employed in a negative fashion to describe a wine that was "oaky, alcoholic and bombastic—which I totally disagree with, by the way."

Mr. Parker believes that the more accurate definition of a "Parkerized" wine would be "one produced from previously underachieving vineyards whose winemakers got serious about creating a quality wine." After all, the 65-year-old Mr. Parker has spent his entire 30-year career championing talented winemakers who produce wines that outperform the standards of their country, their region and their peers.

Quite a few winemakers have become celebrities (not to mention millionaires) thanks to Mr. Parker's enthusiastic descriptions of their wines and the scores he awards them on his 100-point scale (on which the lowest score is 50). In fact, I'd argue that Mr. Parker's exuberant, multiparagraph descriptions in the Wine Advocate, his subscriber-only newsletter, are even more impactful than his numerical scores. (There are some 50,000 Wine Advocate newsletter subscribers, who pay $130 a year. There is also a separate website, eRobertParker.com.) Mr. Parker is an unabashed fan of deliciousness—his pleasure is practically palpable, his excitement truly infectious, even if it occasionally goes over the top.

“Pundits have long enjoyed lampooning Mr. Parker's exuberant verbiage.”

Indeed, pundits have long enjoyed lampooning Mr. Parker's verbiage, which can occasionally sound like a parody of itself. Here is Mr. Parker on the 2005 Harlan Estate, a cult Napa Cabernet: "The 2005 exhibits a gorgeous thick-looking ruby/purple color in addition to a beautiful nose of burning embers interwoven with crème de cassis, roasted meats, sweet black truffles and spring flowers…this cuvée seems to want to be both a Pauillac and a ripe vintage of La Mission Haut-Brion." It's an almost Shakespearean style of tasting note—and one no other wine writer has ever quite managed to pull off.

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

The lunch featured a salmon appetizer.

It's certainly not the sort of writing that one would associate with a former Farm Credit Bank attorney—Mr. Parker's job before he turned to wine criticism full-time. As the story goes (and it's one well familiar to serious wine drinkers), Mr. Parker was inspired by his hero, Ralph Nader, to become a consumer advocate for wine drinkers. When Mr. Parker began his newsletter in 1978 (initially titled the Baltimore-Washington Wine Advocate), the wine trade was rife with cronyism and conflicts of interest. Leading wine writers were often engaged in selling the wines they wrote about, especially in the U.K.

Robert M. Parker Jr.'s Picks

Eric Kruszewski for The Wall Street Journal

The lunch featured three bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, including the 2009 Château de Beaucastel Vieilles Vignes.

• The greatest wine he has ever tasted: 1978 Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Mouline.
• The best Châteauneuf-du-Pape vintage: Either 2007 or 2010—'we will have to wait six to eight years to tell.'
• Wine-drinking life lesson: A glass of water for every glass of wine. Badoit, the French sparkling water, is Mr. Parker's favorite.

And their notes on wines were often florid if rather vague on particulars. "I often thought the Brits hedged their bets—they couldn't be held accountable because they didn't really say anything about the wines," said Mr. Parker. That was one reason he decided to employ the 100-point scoring system. At least that way he was "putting his stake in the ground."

Mr. Parker's other now-legendary point of distinction was his ringing endorsement of the 1982 Bordeaux vintage when every other wine critic dismissed both the wines and the vintage. Mr. Parker saw greatness—and he turned out to be right. The 1982 Bordeaux are still some of the most sought-after wines in the world. It was the turning point that put Mr. Parker enduringly on the wine map.

While he has been instrumental in determining the fortunes of wine producers in other regions, especially California and the Rhône, Bordeaux has been a particularly important region for Mr. Parker—and it's one of the regions that Mr. Parker still visits each year. (He has assigned deputies to cover the wines from most other parts of the world, including Burgundy, Italy, Germany, California and Washington state.)

When Mr. Parker assigned his deputy Antonio Galloni to review the wines of California last year, speculation among bloggers and writers was rife: Was Mr. Parker planning to retire? Did he have a replacement? Was he selling the Wine Advocate? And what would happen to the price of California wines, especially the pricier ones, if Mr. Parker weren't rating them? I put some of those questions to Mr. Parker that afternoon.

Mr. Parker gently shooed aside his bulldog Betty Jane (he's almost as impassioned about dogs as he is wine) and offered some semiconvincing assurances. "There is no apparent heir, although Antonio has the work ethic and the integrity to do it." But, he added, he had no intention of retiring. "I still work 12-, 14-hour days when I'm on the road," he said, though he no longer tastes hundreds of wines a day in his home office as he once did.

Mr. Parker said he has entertained offers to buy his newsletter over the years, including three from "hedge-fund guys," but so far he has refused them all, in part because he would not relinquish editorial control of the newsletter. And with that, Mr. Parker announced that lunch was almost ready—although there was time for a brief cellar tour.

The Parker cellar lies just below the kitchen floor and is accessed by a door decorated with a charming photo of the young Parkers: Pat Parker looked like a double for Natalie Wood, while Mr. Parker looked like Jack Nicholson in his prime. The Parker cellar, on the other hand, looked like nothing I've ever seen before. There were wooden cases of wine stacked all the way to the ceiling of the cellar—wines of impeccable pedigree and provenance, but in a bit of a perilous jumble. Mr. Parker assured me he knew where everything was, and besides, no one but him came down to the cellar. Pat hadn't visited "in years," he said.

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I was flattered to have been granted admittance, if somewhat alarmed. "Watch the broken glass," Mr. Parker cautioned. He stood behind cases of first-growth Bordeaux and recounted that he recently found a case of 1982 La Fleur-Pétrus. "That increased my net worth," Mr. Parker said with a laugh. The cellar has about 10,000 bottles, by Mr. Parker's estimate. He will probably end up donating a good portion of it to charity one day, as his daughter, Maia, is of drinking age but prefers tequila to wine.

Upstairs, Pat Parker was ready with the crab cakes and Mr. Parker had three bottles open—all Châteauneuf-du-Papes, two reds and one white. The Parkers drink Rhône wines with most meals, although Mr. Parker is, surprisingly, a fan of simple Spanish whites, especially Godello and Albariño. "They've really had a quality revolution with Spanish whites," said Mr. Parker, who has also been known to drink a Tavel rosé or two—something the detractors of "Parkerized" wines would likely be surprised to find out.

The white Châteauneuf-du-Pape was the 2009 Château de Beaucastel Vieilles Vignes, "the best white I've had in the past year," said Mr. Parker, who proceeded—in a rapid, stream-of-consciousness fashion—to describe what he found in the wine: "honey, white flower, white apricot, marmalade—it's viscous but elegant."

"Slow down!" Pat said, laughing.

That's the one thing that Mr. Parker—who is still tasting and traveling, and now working on a memoir as well—doesn't seem able to do.

See Off Duty wine videos and more at youtube.com/wsj. Email Lettie at wine@wsj.com.

How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File

Reuters

How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File

Reuters