Since 1981 the magazine
Wine Spectator has given "Awards of Excellence" to restaurants that it deems to have exceptional wine lists. To win an award a restaurant must submit their wine list to the magazine and pay a $250 application fee. Over two-thirds of the restaurants who submit an application win an award, and the contest earns
Wine Spectator over $1 million a year in fees.
In 2008 the magazine gave an award to Osteria L’Intrepido, a restaurant in Milan, Italy. It was later embarrassed to discover that this restaurant did not exist.
Robin Goldstein, author of
The Wine Trials, had submitted the name of the fake restaurant along with a phony wine list that included a number of
Wine Spectator's lowest scoring Italian wines. In order to make the restaurant seem genuine, he also created a website for it and posted some fictitious reviews online. He said that his purpose was to determine "how
Wine Spectator magazine determines its Awards of Excellence for the world’s best wine restaurants."
Goldstein revealed his hoax at the August 2008 conference of the American Association of Wine Economists. He noted that while Osteria L'Intrepido may have been the first fake restaurant to enter the award program, "it’s unlikely that it was the first submission that didn’t accurately reflect the contents of a restaurant’s wine cellar." He characterized the Awards of Excellence as a mere advertising scheme.
Wine Spectator responded that the incident merely demonstrated that it could be deceived by an "elaborate hoax".
Links and References
Comments
"Elaborate", in this case, seeming to be "a selection of their own worst-rated wines" and stock photos on a website. I had no idea my Geocities webpage back in high school was 'elaborate'!
Don't you just think that maybe these companies would save more face if they simply came out and said "Yeah, we got rolled, we're a sham and this proves it" instead of making up pathetic excuses of this sort? I mean, who's likely to care? The people who are dumb enough to send you 250$ and a .txt file so they can "earn" the right to put a .jpg on their website and menus?
Not that I'm condoning fraud, here... but if the victims of Wine Spectator were smart, they'd just manufacture their own meaningless graphic with a pretentious name and convince other, equally stupid customers that the "McDonalds Happy Wine Award for Excellence in Fermented Grape Drank Achievement" (yes, drank) is super prestigious. Artists have been using the technique for centuries, after all...