Decanter Magazine recently named Anthony Barton of Chateau Leoville-Barton as their "Decanter Man of the Year". He joins a similarly-feted honor-roll of the wine establishment, which over the last 20 years has included: Marcel Guigal, Miguel Torres, Roderer Champagne's Jean Claude Rauzad, Jancis Robinson, Hugh Johnson, Georg Riedel, Dr. Ernst Losen, Michael Broadbent, Chateau Lynch-Bages' Jean Michel Cazes, Alexis Lachine, and Robert Mondavi. (Robert Parker must be either incredibly pissed off, or congratulating himself for being left uninvited to such a blue-blooded party.)It's a list that's noteworthy more for the prestige of its members than their relative merit---after all, awards traditionally confer honorary membership into a more exalted society for public service that risks going otherwise unrecognized. You don't hand out medals to the aristocracy unless you're trying to suck up to them.
The whole operation thus has the whiff of a blogger posting a link to a more prestigious site, or an on-line magazine like Salon handing out medals to Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs. What you're smelling is the courtier flattering his royal family in the knowledge that it's probably the only access they're going to allow him.
