The 1990s were an exciting decade for wine — particularly in the United States. During that decade, the industry saw a massive turnover of ownership from the post-War, post-Prohibition pioneers in California to their children. That new generation was eager to fuse modern sales and marketing techniques with the Old World art of vinification, broadening the appeal of wine even further. They also paid more attention to the specific tastes of reviewers and adjusted their production techniques accordingly.

For instance, many wineries knew that the influential American critic Robert Parker preferred highly extracted red wines that saw lengthy maturation periods in oak barrels. Because of this, many producers started making thick, jammy, high-alcohol reds and spared no expense on new French and American oak barrels, driving the price of the wines up considerably. This method of changing a wine style to meet the preferences of critics—with the hope of getting a higher score—is now cynically called Parkerization. It began in the mid-1990s but continues today. And who can blake winemakers for doing it? Scores drive pricing, and a bottle that receives a score of 98, 99, or 100 points almost always sells out on release. Parker didn’t help matters by occasionally hinting about the criteria he used for a wine to receive high marks.

An Austin-based Master Sommelier named Devon Broglie once explained the subjective nature of wine ratings in this way: Say you have an apple expert who’s paid to write about apples and analyze their merits. The critic's true passion lies with a very specific apple variety, however. He loves everything about Gala apples—from the history of how they’re grown, to the region of where their orchards are most prevalent, to the individual farmers who grow them. On the other hand, he hates Granny Smiths. They’re naturally more acidic and too tangy for him. So when he’s giving out reviews, his baseline score for Granny Smiths is always in the mid-80s. He’ll never give them more than 92 points, because he doesn’t think their backstory and flavor profile will ever be deserving of it. With Galas, though, he starts at a baseline of 92 points, because he likes them so much better. However, apple-eating laypeople don’t know this. His readers automatically believe whatever the apple expert says and assume that personal taste has very little to do with the scores. Before you know it, the price of Galas rise, and people gravitate toward them over Granny Smiths. The apple orchards, to meet the demand and gain higher scores, start growing more Galas. This is akin to what happened with the Parkerization of wine in the 1980s.