Published December 10, 2012

Less than a month after a Wall Street Journal article reported that wine critic and former Wine Enthusiast Magazine columnist Robert M. Parker Jr. had decided against various offers for The Wine Advocate, his subscription-supported newsletter, it appears he has sold a “substantial interest” of the company after all.

Parker remains in place as one of the publication’s reviewers and, according to several reports, will be the company’s chairman. The new investor-owners are said to be from Singapore, where the newly announced editor in chief, Lisa Perrotti-Brown, MW, is based.

In the midst of all the WA changes, perhaps the reports having the biggest repercussions were that the newsletter would cease print publication—being made available to subscribers as a PDF—that it would accept advertising for nonwine products and that it would produce wine tasting events.

Those changes would mean that WA was no longer a newsletter, no longer supported only by subscribers and not beholden to any commercial wine interests. It would become a digital magazine, plain and simple. Sure, it wouldn’t accept wine advertising, but if it had commercial relationships with the wineries, importers or retailers that support its tasting events, it could no longer legitimately claim independence from the wine trade.

For decades, it was this veneer of independence that made WA different, which made it special and worth supporting for many readers, even through some hefty subscription-rate increases. It was this same independence that led readers to accept that the wines reviewed in its pages need not always be tasted blind.

If WA were on its way to becoming just another wine magazine—albeit the one with the world’s best-known wine critic behind it—it would be interesting to see how this affected its content. Relieved from the burden of ink and printing costs, would there be illustrated articles, or would the content continue to be heavily reliant on wine reviews? Would the wines be tasted blind, as they are by all of the world’s other major wine magazines?

But wait. It seems all of this speculation is much ado about nothing.

In a series of tweets this morning, Parker wrote that the print edition of WA will continue and that it “will never take on ads,” while at the same time leaving room for some luxury advertising on the Web site and online forums.

As someone whose nascent interest in wine was encouraged by Parker’s writing back in the late 1980s—it made a mouthwatering antidote to the staidness of the British writers of the time—I’m glad to hear that WA will be continuing without the major shake up that most media outlets have reported.

Yes, there are some changes, but they appear to be small and incremental—and largely positive. Providing a PDF option for subscribers is a useful option; having Perrotti-Brown as an editor should improve the quality of the content; and making the newsletter’s contributors regular employees will go a long way to avoiding any appearances of impropriety going forward.

If and when the publication does evolve further from its homegrown, Nader-esque roots, I hope that the new one will be a worthy successor.

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