According to Mike Steinberger, Parker has inadvertently made becoming a wine critic in the future almost impossible, since— in part because of the success of his scoring system—it is now prohibitively expensive to taste the very wines one should criticize. If it behooves a critic to understand, say, Château Lafite 1982, 2000, 2003, and 2005 before assessing the latest vintage: the critic must drink wine worth tens of thousands of dollars before beginning the review. This was not true when Steinberger became a connoisseur in the 1970s.