So - Author Robin Goldstein was wondering what exactly it took for a restaurant to win the "coveted" Wine Spectator Award of Excellence...in order to find out he created a fake restaurant. I mean, when we say fake we are talking about a fake menu, fake website and best of all a fake wine list. Robin decided to take it a step further by making the "Reserve" wine list full of wines that Spectator had given its worst scores to over the last 20 years - like 67 point scores.
$250, a cover letter, completed application and a few months later Osteria L’Intrepido (the name of the fake venture) won a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence! See Robin's take on the whole situation here:
http://osterialintrepido.wordpress.com/
This is not the first time the Award of Excellence has come under fire as simply being a money center for the Spectator. In 2003 Amanda Hesser wrote a piece for the New York Times (click here to read the article) describing how 3,573 restaurants that applied for the award that year grossed Wine Spectator $625,275 (@ the then fee of $175 a pop).
So if in 2003 94% of all applicants won the award and this year a fake restaurant won the award how just plain awful must those places be that don't win? It pretty much makes the whole thing seem like a big joke...
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