Lyle Fass on the Ebob Board: RIP (11/23/02-11/21/07)

Well it was a wild, fun ride and I sure did learn a lot, meet some great people and waste a boatload of time but just like my best relationships, this ended in name-calling, yelling, people being hurt and each side thinking they are right. I was a young, energetic wine geek working at The Wine Shop in New York City and eager to learn. I was finding my voice and my palate at this time and as the Wine Shop was and still is a point driven wine store I was on the brand spanking new erobertparker.com website a lot trolling for reviews and the such. Started poking around the mark squires bulletin board part of the board and then finally decided to take the plunge to register and finally post. My first note was on the 2000 Jacky Truchot Chambolle Musigny 1er Cru "Les Sentiers" which I sold at the time. No complaints then . . .but I get ahead of myself. And yes as we can see I was using points. Hey we all gotta start somewhere. But this started my obsession with ebob as we can see this thread was pretty educational and civilized. Boy how have things changed. I was learning a lot and honing my palate and the board was a great resource. Hell, Mark Squires even shopped at the Wine Shop and we were friendly and cordial to each other. Then something happened and I think I can pinpoint this moment as when Squires started to become drunk with power. For those of you not familiar with the Parker Board there is an area called the Social Hall which is where all non wine related stuff goes, or these days anything Mark Squires decides to put in there. If you mention you had a steak with 20 2002 Bordeaux . . .it's going in Food & Wine or if you mention you had 20 2002 Bordeaux while watching a movie that is definetly Social Hall material because Mao Squires does not believe anything else except what is in the glass is important. No context. But again I get ahead of myself. The Social Hall is also a place where there were lots of political discussions and they got heated and nasty but always were a source of entertainment to me. Seeing some of those right wing freak-shows rant about everything from intelligent design to how horrible gay people are was like watching a car accident you shouldn't look at but cannot pull your eyes away. Probably explains why I watch Faux News every now and then. But Squires banned political talk from the Social Hall and to be honest he usually was the one with the torch leading the unruly mob. But once you ban something the rest is shortly to follow and that is what happened. The road became a lot thornier as posters freedoms became more and more restricted. Robert Parker started to become much more irascible and confrontational when people disagreed with him which also concurred with the general change in people's palates away from oaky, fruity, gobby wine to wines of more, nuance, restraint and finesse. And parker was the king of unctous hedonistic fruit bombs which people dug up until around 2000-2001 when things started to shift. The more people complained about Marquis Phillips the more fire-breathing Parker and his minion Mao Squires became. Parker started to insult his readers with terms like "the pleasure police" and the such. Or comparing fellow board member Ian Fitzsimmons to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which is not the way you treat your subscribers or participants on your bulletin board. They were starting to see their empire crumble as other voices became more prominent like Meadows, Raynolds, bloggers etc. With the democraticization of the internet other voices matter and have the platform to be heard. I was one of those voices and as you all know I am outspoken. My palate in these years was becoming more and more refined and I was definetly finding myself in the no-oak, no gobs, no spoofilation camp and much more into wines of place with my tastes mainly gravitating towards French, German and Austrian wines. There were dangerous trends in the wine world too with Parker's influence still big and and winemakers making wines that were exclusively designed to score high points with Robert Parker. Because no matter what, high Parker Points sell wine. Me and many other people were fearful that the wine world was becoming homogenized which led to the phrase "the internationalization of wine." All this information is relevant as this is the neccesary background information that led to my boot. So with all this in place the Parker Board became a battleground for this epic battle of non-spoof vs. spoof, Aussie fruit bomb defenders vs Aussie fruit bomb lovers, old-school Bordeaux versus all other Bordeaux with both sides really not being receptive to what the other side has to say. So Squires is now on top of all this. So he had a decision to make and unfortunately he went in the other direction. He became drunk with power. He became a member of the WA team and that just cemented his ego and seemed to give him purpose. The censorship bender then started. Any thread that had viewpoints that disagreed with the general consensus of the WA, Robert Parker or Mark Squires was locked down or worse deleted. It seemed that every thread that mentioned spoofilation, Alice Feiring, Jancis Robinson, Michael Broadbent (who Squires once dismissively called a dinosaur), Hugh Johnson, etc. was shut down. Censorship was in full effect on this board. Then came the email he sent me in April/May of this year that told me I could no longer post tasting notes on wines I sell. I had been on the board over four years at this point posting tasting notes because I loved wine. But Mao Squires, the paranoid delusional Chinese leader that he is, thought I had an agenda to move vast quantities of wine through TN's on the board and banned me from posting TN's on the board of wines I sell. This did not sit well with me because it NEVER even occurred to me this was happening. Just something he decided one day and that was that. He never mentioned about all the spoofilated wines that I was selling that I trashed. That pissed me off. So now that I was banned from posting 95% of my tasting notes I became bored, reactionary and angry. So this led me to be much more antagonistic with the tone of my posts, dropping smarmy and quippy one-liners much more often and getting in the middle of shit more often. Of all my 4,500 plus posts on that board I am sure 2/3's of them were tasting notes. So one thing led to another and a cadre of anti-Parker/Squires people became more vocal on the board (Levenberg, Rogness, me, etc.)and as a result of having opposing opinions we became targets of Squires. He singled me out and started chiming in on my threads and antagonizing me. I also was outraged at his rampant censorship and as I am a big first amendment guy that outrage was channeled into my posts which were dripping with irony, punchiness and outrage. So one thing led to another and an argument about high alcohol wines (a major Squires sore spot, along with obese Americans for some reason),which dripped into other threads, and I lost it one day after he posted something again antagonizing me about not backing up facts because I did not name hundreds of 16-17-18 percent high alcohol wines. I called him repulsive, said I pitied him etc. It transferred over to e-mail where it got really nasty and that was that. I was banned from the board. It probably is a good thing for me as I can put more time into my blog and also work on other exciting projects. It is a bad thing for freedom of speech though, as I think people enjoyed what I had to say, and besides Mark Squires and a couple other folks I had the general respect of most people who participated and read the board. It's his board, which is actually a messed up thing, because it really is a community and he should actually do what normal moderators do, which is mine for spam and advertisements instead of dictating content, taste and opinion as that is a tricky path to navigate. It is a shame the the biggest and most important wine board on Earth is run by a megalomaniacal lunatic who dismisses other opinions that he does not agree with and is drunk with power. Why Parker chose him to run his board will always be beyond me?