Should you ever feel overwhelmed by wine, take heart: The professionals in the field apparently feel the same way. Years ago, such übertasters as Robert M. Parker Jr. of the Wine Advocate and Stephen Tanzer of the International Wine Cellar, were one-man bands. They trumpeted Bordeaux, banged the drum for Burgundy, and strummed about Spain, often all in the same issue of their personal newsletters.

But lately it’s clearly become too much. The one-man-band wine newsletter is today almost a thing of the past. Recently, Mr. Parker replaced his one full-time tasting comrade (who covered Burgundy and anything else that Mr. Parker chose to personally forego) with no fewer than three new full-time employees, one of whom is devoted exclusively to Italian wines.

Mr. Tanzer, for his part, previously employed part-time tasting help.These freelance palates offered tasting notes from locales such as Australia and Hungary. But until last year, Mr. Tanzer never had a full-time palate partner to help ease the load. Now he does.

What this tells us is that a certain fatigue likely has set in.After all, Messrs. Parker and Tanzer have been in the tasting-note trenches for decades; both are in their mid to late 50s. More than this, though, they are overwhelmed by wine itself. The world is issuing more must-be-tasted fine wine than even these stalwarts can take on.

We’ve reached the end of the Age of the Heroic Taster. It began in earnest in 1972 with the wine newsletter of San Francisco–based Robert Finigan (who eventually fell by the journalistic wayside) and expanded most significantly a few years later with the still-vibrant efforts of Messrs. Parker and Tanzer. It was a kind of Faustian era, in which tasters exchanged seemingly all their waking hours to taste all wines worth a sip and a score.

Their newsletters were all about the primacy of the “hero palate.” Now, however, they are of necessity ceding — or at least sharing — the field with others, with the implication that their employees are reliable extensions of themselves. (Mr. Tanzer, introducing his fulltime tasting employee, Josh Raynolds, wrote, “Josh’s scores for wines he has tasted blind with me have been within a point or two of mine upwards of 90% of the time.”)

These newsletters are changing not just because of the sheer grind of one person tasting thousands of wine a year for nearly three decades, but from the new realities of Web-based wine writers.

Messrs. Parker and Tanzer still are tethered to print, although both offer their readers Internet options. But others, such as Allen Meadows of Burghound.com and Jancis Robinson of JancisRobinson.com float expansively, and far less expensively, in cyberspace.

Mr. Meadows, for example, specializes in Burgundy, offering far more extensive coverage and tasting notes than any competing print-based newsletter could afford to deliver. He now dominates the subject, with thousands of subscribers worldwide paying $125 for four exclusively Web-based issues a year.

Mr. Meadows represents today’s new heroic taster in the classic all-knowing and all-tasting mode but only in a narrowly defined field where it’s feasible for one person to seal the Faustian deal and financially plausible for him to do so thanks to the near-absence of production costs. Print newsletters such as those of Messrs. Parker and Tanzer (neither of which carries advertising) are dinosaurs, eventually to be made extinct by Web-based vehicles.

When that happens, we will see yet more changes. New Web newsletters like Burghound.com will emerge for categories such as Bordeaux or Italian wines, which enjoy a sizable worldwide audience of enthusiasts. And what about the all-wines-all-the-time approach? With three full-time tasters, Mr. Parker’s Wine Advocate is edging ever closer to a magazine model, never mind the absence of advertising or graphics.

In a Web-based world, these employees can be milked for ever-larger numbers of tasting notes and in-depth reportage, which can be conveyed on the Web far better and more comprehensively than in prohibitively expensive paper-based print.

Ironically, such a 21st-century newsletter then finds itself cheek by Internet jowl with conventional magazines such as Wine Spectator (where I have a column, it should be noted) or Food & Wine. Both have increasingly potent Web presences; both accept advertising. Not least, these and other deep-pocket publications can ramp up with ever more content if need be.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” said the now-famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner. The question soon will be: If you’re not a heroic taster but instead more a drum major in a parade of palates, will anyone know you’re a newsletter?