Remembering Bob Finigan
Pioneer wine critic, and a good guy
Posted: Oct 5, 2011 12:37pm ET
Robert Finigan, who died last Saturday, was one of the first
wine people I met when I moved to San Francisco in 1977. He had already
established himself as the leading U.S. wine critic for serious wine drinkers,
even though he did not write for a major newspaper or magazine. Hard to
remember now, before there was Wine Spectator and other wine magazines and
newsletters, before people tweeted and blogged about their latest wine finds,
wine critics were known for the pulpits they preached from. In other words, the
newspapers or magazines were the vehicle that delivered readers. My Sunday
column had a reach of more than 1 million readers because it was in the San
Francisco Examiner,
where I was the food and wine editor.
Robert Finigan's Private Guide to Wines broke the mold in this and other
ways. Leading wine writers then seldom set out to systematically address whole
categories of wines. They wrote general stories about regions or vintages and
never leveled criticism at specific wines, but in his Bay Area newsletter
Finigan made specific recommendations and backed up his credentials by naming
wines he determined were undeserving of praise. In 1977, the year I moved to
California, his newsletter went national, and his assessment of wines or
vintages were the ones that carried the most weight.
In person, Bob was a quiet guy, but it turned out we shared a
number of interests, including fascinations with both baseball and opera. I
can't say we became close friends, but we went to baseball games and saw each
other at the opera and symphony concerts as often as at public wine tastings. When
I had to review a San Francisco restaurant for Wine Spectator, Bob was my first call to accompany
me when my wife could not. The conversations always spanned a wide range of
topics. Bob was Harvard-educated but down to earth about it.
At one point Finigan purchased Jack Shelton's restaurant
newsletter, which had done for local restaurant criticism something similar to
Finigan's wine letter by unabashedly praising or unflinchingly hammering
restaurants in his reviews. But by
then, Bob's influence as a wine critic had been overshadowed by a brash lawyer
from Maryland. The turning point came in 1983, when Finigan slapped down the
1982 vintage in Bordeaux, finding the wines overly alcoholic. Robert Parker,
who had a small local publication of his own, loved the vintage, raved about
the wines, and made his name as a bold critic on that call.
By 1990, Parker's ascendancy, multiplied by troubles with
his financial partners in the newsletters, closed Finigan's publications. He
continued to write, and for a while he reviewed wines for a small-circulation
wine magazine, and started up a short-lived restaurant guide. He wrote books,
including a very good primer called Robert Finigan's Essentials of Wine: A
Guide to Discovering the World's Most Pleasing Wines (1987) and Corks and Forks: Thirty Years of Wine
and Food (2006).
He confided to me one of the scariest times of his life,
when the after-effects of a cold virus robbed him of his sense of smell for
several months. You can imagine what it would mean to a food-and-wine critic if
the objects of our attention tasted all alike, which is to say, like nothing.
Issue dates of his newsletters passed without publication. The senses did
return, fully, but that scare, combined with the financial partner problems,
weakened his already diminishing franchise.
I will
always remember Bob at the ballpark, though. No one I knew shared the depth of
knowledge about the game combined with the world view to put it all in context.
I remember driving to Candlestick Park to see a Giants game with him, a friend
who sings tenor in the opera chorus, and another friend who is in an
opera-listening group with me. We were listening to a CD compilation and
playing "guess the tenor." I doubt if other cars full of married guys going to
that game were doing that.
Harvey, can you recall any special bottles/wine experiences with Bob?