There are certain terms that do just mean "it tastes expensive," yes (and reviewers that are paid by the word frequently whip out the wine-taster's thesaurus to spew them all over the page to fill their quota.) But the kinds of details I'm talking about aren't those--looking for, say, a "hint of nutmeg" in a wine won't put you into a higher echelon of prices. It'll just give you wines that taste more like nutmeg.
> it makes a case that reviewers generally can't identify more than six or so flavors in a wine
I don't see what's wrong with that. Six is already a lot of details to pick out. By that point, you're getting down past the standards of the label and into things like "orange zest", which really do let you discriminate a wine with a flavor you might want to try from one that turns you off.
> they often can't even tell red from white
This isn't as shocking a pronouncement as it's made out to be. Here's the quote:
> They called it "jammy," for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its "crushed red fruit."
This implies that they clearly could tell it wasn't your average red--those are the kinds of things you would say about a red (usually as a veiled insult) when it doesn't have any tannin or oak in it, which tends to imply that it's basically a white made with red grapes (that is, made with white-wine processes, that don't seek to capture tannins.)
Whites and reds, although they seem like (and are treated like) separate things, are really just a spectrum; there's no dividing point where a white becomes a red, flavor-wise; there are whites that taste like reds, and reds that taste like whites. The category is just about the color, nothing else.
Considering how most other defenders have reverted to simple knee-jerk "it's obviously not bullshit, I go tasting all the time" reactions, possibly without even reading the linked article, I salute (and update) you.
Edit: refined text to clarify meaning. s/not exactly winning/not entirely winning/
Relevant article from him: http://www.timswineblog.com/2011/01/robert-parker-is-not-the...
Is it? The article points to studies that correlate verbiage price. Additionally, it makes a case that reviewers generally can't identify more than six or so flavors in a wine. Combined with evidence that they often can't even tell red from white, what chance is there the review will be accurate about specifics within a category when they can't even be trusted to get the category right?