(WineLoversPage) - It is hard not to think of Shakespeare’s aging King Lear as the wine world begins moving past the era of Robert M. Parker Jr., the powerful American wine critic who popularized the 100-point scoring system and who once wielded such market-moving power that his taste for big, ripe and alcoholic wines altered the world’s style of wine making from France to California to Australia and beyond.

There has always been a quiet murmur of resistance to the Parker style, of course, but the murmur has begun swelling in recent years, famously rising at least briefly to a roar after Parker belatedly discovered Twitter in 2010 and famously posted a rant declaring opponents of his favored style “The Anti-Flavor Wine Elite.”

I joyously took the side of the AFWE in a February 2010 column, “The anti-flavor wine elite,” in which I wrote, “Whoa! Wine elites? This bore an eerie resemblance to a vinous Teabagger. It was red meat for a lot of people … it stung a bit to have our tastes dissed as ‘anti-flavor’ and ‘elite.’ Some online wine geeks have actually begun labeling themselves with the tongue-in-cheek acronym, ‘AFWE.’ I like that …” Click here if you’d like to read it all.

Two years after that brouhaha, Parker stepped down as editor-in-chief of Wine Advocate, a position he had held since 1976, selling the magazine to a group of investors in … wait for it … Singapore. He remains on Wine Advocate‘s board and continues contributing tasting notes, reported The Los Angeles Times; and he speaks at wine-trade conferences, sometimes controversially, presumably commanding respectable honoraria for doing so.

Suddenly Parker seems to be only one more voice in a growing generation of younger sommeliers, bloggers, and social-media wine geeks of all ages in a changing world where everyone can have a voice but where it’s difficult for one voice to stand out, particularly if that voice is older, graying, overweight, slowing down a bit, and increasingly cranky (a definition, I might add, which also fits this humble critic reasonably well, except perhaps for the “cranky” part.)

Which brings us to a fascinating, long story by Bruce Schoenfeld. which will appear Sunday in The New York Times magazine, is already online. You can click this link to read it in full, and I highly recommend that you do so.

The gist of it, however, is incorporated in these three paragraphs:

“If ripe wines are considered good, many California producers reasoned, those made from grapes brought to the brink of desiccation, to the peak of ripeness (or even a bit beyond), should taste even better. That logical leap has created a new American vernacular for wine, a dense, opaque fruitiness well suited to a nation of Pepsi drinkers. More sweet fruit, more of the glycerol that makes wine feel thicker in the mouth, more alcohol. And by extension, more pleasure.

“Pleasure is a matter of opinion, of course. But for three decades, the tastes of mainstream American wine drinkers have been shaped by the personal preferences of one man, Robert M. Parker Jr.