In fact, group members do tend to proselytize, which befits a sectarian splinter group trying to challenge established orthodoxy. They point out that Parker’s influence has been so strong over the past quarter-­century that he has actively altered winemaking techniques — not only in Napa but also in regions from Europe to Australia. To sell expensive bottles, producers needed access to the American market. And to get that, they needed Parker.

In 1978, while working as a lawyer for a Baltimore bank, Parker started a newsletter called The Wine Advocate. The name played off his occupation as an attorney, but it meant more than that. Convinced that many highly regarded producers were passing off thin, unappealing wines as fashionable, he created a 100-­point scoring system and then wielded it like a truncheon. He awarded high numbers to wines that tasted the way he believed good wines ought to taste. He punished others with scores in the 70s and 80s and biting insults to match.

Today, The Wine Advocate, which has some 50,000 subscribers, provides detailed descriptions of wines it rates to help readers gauge if their preferences are similar. Nevertheless, by attaching a precise and easily understood score to the commentary, Parker gives the impression — purposeful or not — that he isn’t merely communicating his personal reaction to each wine but quantifying its intrinsic value. For American consumers, the idea that the quality of various wines can be compared as easily as batting averages or stock quotes has proved irresistible. “People would walk into wine shops with the name of a wine and Parker’s rating, and not one word about the style or character of the wine,” says Michael Mondavi, whose father, Robert, is largely responsible for spreading the fame of Napa Valley wines across America. “Just because of the two digits he’d assigned to it, they’d buy it.”

Parker’s taste has always been broader than his detractors like to admit. “It’s simplistic to say that Bob just wants fruit bombs,” says Jeb Dunnuck, who writes reviews for The Wine Advocate. But the wines that receive Parker’s highest scores — those 98s, 99s and 100s that have turned previously unknown producers into cult favorites — are typically the most intensely flavored and come from places, like Napa, where the grapes are most consistently ripe.

For wine regions in some of the warmer areas around the world, the lure of Parker’s endorsement was overwhelming. “Spain went through a time when a lot of wines were being made a certain way in order to get a score,” Ashley Santoro, the wine director of the Standard East Village restaurant in New York, told me during a break between sessions at the Balance tasting. When local distributors came calling at her former restaurant, they were so certain that Santoro would want their wines, they often assumed she didn’t need to taste them. Parker liked them — what else mattered? “They’d walk in,” Santoro said, “hand me a sheet of paper with a list of scores and say, ‘This got 98.’ ”

As we spoke, a swirl of sommeliers surrounded us, most of them (or so it seemed to me) barely old enough to drink legally. A generation ago, only about five working sommeliers existed in New York. Now they’re everywhere — six alone at a single restaurant, the Modern. Their emergence as independent voices, influenced by their curiosity more than by any pronouncements by Parker or other critics, has helped the Balance group get its wines before a generation of drinkers open to all sorts of guidance. These sommeliers have studied wine as they might otherwise have studied Renaissance art; their ambition is not to compile a wine list but to curate one. As a group, they scorn wines, even tasty ones, that lack a sense of place. If Santoro was going to put a wine from Spain on her list, she said, it should taste Spanish, not like a Spanish version of a California cabernet.