Free The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger

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    In 2010, Robert Parker took a memorable swipe at people who do not share his affection for hulking, high-alcohol Australian wines—“leg-spreaders,” as the Australians like to call them. Via Twitter, he denounced these naysayers as an “anti-flavor wine elite.” The phrase instantly went viral and became a rallying cry for the very people Parker had slammed. Suddenly merchants, sommeliers, and consumers whose preferences differed from Parker’s and who deplored the tendency of producers to cater to his predilections had a catchphrase for their cause. It has since been trimmed to just an abbreviation—on wine sites, posters will identify themselves as AFWE.
    But it was the anti-Parker forces who fired the first shot in this war of words, coining the term spoofulated — spoofed for short—to describe wines that are egregiously manipulated—made with excessive new oak, enzymes, and other additives that give them a tarted-up taste. The word was apparently conceived in New York anti-flavor wine elite circles and quickly caught on.
    Whether a wine can be classified as spoofulated is obviously a subjective judgment. However, one brand of wines has become virtually synonymous with the term. Mollydooker is a line of wines produced in Australia. These are some of the most over-the-top, flamboyant, palate-searing wines you will every taste. If you can find a bottle of Mollydooker, give it a try; just don’t say you weren’t warned!
    Even as his career nears its end, Parker remains a singularly polarizing figure in the wine world. There is no denying his towering legacy; no one did more than Parker to get Americans excited about wine or to turn them on to the good stuff. However, he has become something of an irascible tyrant in his twilight, often lashing out at Burgundy, Burgundy fans, and other enemies, real or imagined. His palate, too, has undergone a peculiar evolution. Many oenophiles, as they get on in years, gravitate to quiet, subtle wines. By contrast, Parker’s thirst for the big and dramatic seems only to have grown, to the point that the word Parkerized has become universal shorthand for ultraripe, high-alcohol, lavishly oaked wines—hedonistic fruit bombs, to use the Parker vernacular. Oak and alcohol have become two of the most contentious issues in wine, and both are worth a close look.
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    Along with genuflecting in the direction of Burgundy and bad-mouthing Parker, complaining about the use of new oak is considered a mark of sophistication in some wine circles these days. Occasionally you’ll even catch people griping about the oakiness of wines that weren’t actually raised in oak (word to the wise: if you are going to complain about the wood influence in a wine, first make sure the wine was actually vinified and/or aged in wood). Wood barrels have long been used to age wines, but it was in the 1960s and ’70s that the idea of using new barrels for each vintage took hold. Although the history is a bit murky, the use of new oak barrels seems to have caught on first in Bordeaux and then spread elsewhere, including California. Oak barrels, whether new or old, expose wines to small amounts of oxygen; the oxygen seeps in through the wood’s pores and serves both to soften wines and to give them greater aromatic complexity. The difference between older barrels and new ones is that the latter often impart wood tannins to wines and can strongly influence their taste. The most fashionable barrels are made of new French oak, which can contribute sweetish flavors such as vanilla, coffee, and chocolate to wines. American oak is also popular and is known to give off flavors such as vanilla, coconut, and dill. How much flavor the barrels impart is a function of how tightly grained the wood is, how long the wood was aged, and how heavily it was toasted during the barrel-making. Putting the wine in barrels during the fermentation process can also