Chapter One – An American Palate In Formation
Onkton, Maryland, population 4,615, seems an unlikely hometown for the
world’s most important wine critic. When Robert McDowell Parker, Jr., was born
in Baltimore on July 23, 1947, the landscape north of the city around Monkton
was much as it is now – a typical rural American mix of working dairy farms,
white clapboard farmhouses and modest brick ranch houses, and patches of
second-growth woods and rolling fields. As I drove to his house to spend a day
with him, though, a few large, white-fenced horse farms alerted me to the
presence of the affluent elite of huntcountry blue bloods who have long presided
over point-to-point horse races each spring and fall and attended the annual
Blessing of the Hounds at the local Episcopal church.
But Parker didn’t grow up on one of those grand estates, where the occasional
bottle of wine may have graced the table evei back in the 1940s and 1950s. His
parents married at eighteen and never went to college. For the first few years
of his life, home was the family dairy farm in Monkton, only a 10-minute drive
from where he lives today. Some of the first smells to hit his now famous nose
were fresh milk, cows in the barn, and hay warm from the sun.
Three hundred years ago, when barrels of Bordeaux wines like Château
Haut-Brion and Château Margaux were being regularly auctioned off in London,
Monkton and all of northern Baltimore County was still the domain of the
Susquehannock and Piscataway Indian tribes. In 1634 it was granted to the king’s
representative, Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, who founded Maryland
and leased thousands of acres to settlers before giving a choice parcel that
included Monkton to his fourth wife. Besides dairy farming and creameries,
grist- and sawmills were the earliest industries here, now long gone; the old
stone mills survived as antique shops and homes. Back in the 1950s, when Parker
was growing up, Monkton and neighboring Parkton (where he now lives) were mere
clusters of houses and churches; Monkton had only a tiny food market, no library
or dry cleaner, and the nearest drugstore was 15 miles away.
Today the town is bigger, encompassing all-American nondescript shopping
plazas with supermarkets as their centerpieces; a main street with the standard
town businesses-banks, pizzerias, auto repair shops, and garden centers; and a
bland brick high school set in a field with a sign that reads Hereford High
School, Home of the Bulls. This wasn’t a fine wine and food place in the 1950s,
and it still isn’t, despite the growing number of “executive-style” development
homes and the presence of two tiny wineries a few miles away. The distance to
Baltimore is only 27 miles but must have seemed farther before Interstate 83 was
built, linking the city to points north.
Forget the wide range of gourmet staples urban Americans take for granted.
The store nearest Parker’s house in Parkton turned out to be just a country
place with an old-fashioned Drink Coca-Cola sign and out front, a barrel of
cabbage flowers edged with American flags. The local give-away paper has ads for
popular wines he ignores, like Beringer White Zinfandel, and lists of tree farms
where you can cut your own for Christmas. The score of the latest Hereford Bulls
basketball game is the big news.
Parker’s childhood was a typical one in small-town America of the 1950s,
which meant that food was plentiful but unimportant. His mom’s kitchen
repertoire was unsophisticated farm cooking of the meat loaf and fried chicken
variety, but apart from her wonderful banana cream and lemon meringue pies,
Parker remembers having no particular opinion about what appeared on the family
table. Wine was never served; the beverages of choice were milk, soda, or
coffee, and the occasional cocktail. As a teenager Parker wasn’t the least
interested when his father, Robert Sr., who drank Bourbon and loved inhaling its
rich scent, held out a glass and suggested, “Oh, you should smell this?” And
when Robert Sr., an enthusiastic hunter who kept bluetick hounds, told Robert
Jr. on a hunting trip that you could tell the breed of a dog by its smell, the
boy thought he was joking. Only much later in life did he realize that his
father had an unusually acute sense of smell, and that he had inherited this
same ability.
It was a happy childhood steeped in the middle-class normalcy of riding
bikes, roughhousing with the family cocker spaniels, playing soccer, hanging out
with friends, and enjoying the security of a stay-at-home mom, Ruth “Siddy”
Parker, who never left her only child with a baby-sitter and didn’t work outside
the home until he was in college. When he was four his father gave up the dairy
farm, the family moved a few miles to a newly built ranch house, and Robert
“Buddy” Parker, Sr., went to work selling construction site equipment for a
Baltimore-based oil company, eventually becoming a vice president. He traveled
extensively for his job, but Bob Jr. didn’t go much farther than Baltimore,
Washington, D.C., and once by train to New York City. This cluster of towns in
northern Baltimore County, now known as the Hereford zone, was his world.
A soccer star in high school – he twice made the all-county team as goalie –
Parker was popular, handsome, and easygoing, with the boundless energy that
would one day carry him through marathon wine tastings and 12- to 14-hour days
visiting vineyards. His intensity, competitive spirit, and fierce determination
emerged on the athletic field, where, his mother once observed, “he’d kill
himself to win.” During one faculty-student soccer game, he was carried off the
field and rushed to the hospital with caved-in ribs and bruised lungs after a
teacher butted him in the chest …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy
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