Wine Spectator "Award of Excellence"

Hilarious!

From the NY Times:

The news that Wine Spectator magazine was scammed into giving an Award of Excellence to a non-existent restaurant has been greeted with guffaws by schadenfreude fans and with fury by the magazine’s editor.

More fuel for those who would argue that Wine Spectator designations are pretty much meaningless.

The "participation" of Chowhound in this scam is very surprising. As one of the comments reports:

"On the Web site Chowhound, diners (now apparently fictitious) discussed their experiences at the non-existent restaurant in entries dated January 2008, to August 2008.”

It seems like WS did its due diligence in trying to see if the restaurant is real. I especially think the fake Chowhound reviews are in poor taste. Spammy comments pollute online communities; people other than WS might have gone looking for this restaurant and found nothing. While you may disagree with WS criteria, it’s not like they led anyone astray in thinking they would actually visit the restaurant."

it's hard to believe that Chowhound would have knowingly allowed its site to be used for the purpose of tricking anyone (or, as it turns out, everyone), and it's equally hard to believe that this hoax could been perpetuated without someone in the Chowhound community catching on.

Apparently, when Chowhound mods discovered they'd been gamed for months, they deleted the thread. Really, what else could they have done?

I have never been a big fan of The Wine Speculator. There is a little more to this story that is worth noting. The reserve wine list at "the restaurant" was chosen from "some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the last few decades". Here's a link to the Robert Parker bulletin board regarding this subject - http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/sho ... p?t=178480 and here is a link to a story from the person responsible for this hoax - http://osterialintrepido.wordpress.com/ . The tasting notes for the wines on the reserve list are great.

This shouldn't be that surprising. WS has three awards: The Award of Excellence, the Best of Award of Excellence, and the Grand Award. See here. It has been well-known for a long time that to get the Award of Excellence, which this fictitious restaurant did, one really only needs to put together a few documents and send in $250.

Yes, shame on Wine Spectator for having a largely meaningless award that is really just a money maker and advertising agent for them. The description of the Award of Excellence is "Our basic award, for lists that offer a well-chosen selection of quality producers, along with a thematic match to the menu in both price and style." Clearly, the phony wine list and restaurant did not live up to this description. It is easy to say that WS got what it deserved.

Shame also on Robin Goldstein. While it is fun to revel in his expose of Wine Spectator, he also crossed an ethical line.

I'm not necessarily a big supporter of Wine Spectator (I hardly ever read it), but in fairness, I think it helps to read the other side of the story. The following fact is also highly relevant to allegations that Wine Specator's award is meaningless or is handed out merely for submitting some paperwork and a $250 check: "Nearly one-third of new entries each year do not win awards." (quoting WS Executive Editor Thomas Matthews from the link, above). Unless this means that 1/3 of the checks bounce, I think it pretty much says it all. Whatever you think of Wine Spectator's rating system, the fact is that they are reviewing these applications and there is some meaning to the awards. The "bad apples" on the hoax wine list (below 80 points on the WS 100-point scale) made up only 15 out of 256 wines, while 53 had scores of 90 or above, 102 were between 80 and 89 points and the rest had not been rated by Wine Spectator. That's not a wine list to make a WS editor swoon, but on the other hand, it's completely respectable.

I can assure you it's more than paper work and a fee. I recently was involved in (and won) an award of excellence from Wine Spectator as well as a Wine Enthusiast distinctive dining award.

We sampled and kept tasting notes on 100's of wines over months to craft our list. Then we cross referenced them to meet the particular criteria we were looking for. Then we paired them with all of the food items on the menu. We had to prove proper temperature controlled designated storage conditions as well as creating and supporting the enormous continuing effort that goes into educating and training of staff to sell the wines properly to our guests.

Our investment for holding the open wines aka "Enomatic" systems that displace the oxygen with an inert gas (argon or nitrogen) cost us well over $100K. I'd say that's quite a commitment. Most wine programs are not nearly as ambitious and are just some of the reasons this does mean quite a bit to us.

Say what you will but we remain thrilled and proud of these distinctions. It's always nice to have your extra efforts acknowledged by your peers.

I have my issues with Wine Spectator as I have said before, though I remain a subscriber, and I do find this amusing.

But WS is a useful source of information and opinion, even if the information/opinion cannot and should not be taken as more than a single data point with its own built-in bias, any more than Robert Parker's ratings should, btw, but I will not get into that rant again.

I have used their restaurant reviews and awards at times to select places to eat, and it has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, I found a great place in Albany that seems to get no respect or publicity elsewhere on the web; on the other I dined at a place in the Western Suburbs that had clearly gone downhill and was on its last legs (it closed shortly after my visit). Every time I have used WS to pick a dining establishment, I have found the wine list to be pretty interesting and well-priced - definitely above average. The quality of the food and the overall dining experience was another story entirely, so I do not use WS very often for restaurants.

As to what this does, or does not, prove about Wine Spectator - the awards are not anything other than what they represent themselves to be. One pays a fee and submits a wine list and WS judges that wine list and decides if it looks pretty good. That is all they have ever said they do.

If some smart ass wants to make someone look bad and get a bunch of publicity in doing so, I think we are all easy enough targets. Chowhound was embarrassed as well (though they were not the target, so that fallout is just beginning), just as LTHForum could have been. Those who have it in for Wine Spectator, or web sites, can now jump right up and point out how this proves that these sources are fundamentally untrustworthy, but I do not see how it means anything of the sort. A good hoax can make anyone look bad. Why just recently (last week to be precise), I was talking to a friend and they asked me if I had ever been to that restaurant out in a water intake crib on the lake, and I was obliged to explain that they, too, had been taken in by a good joke. I understand a few others, professionals even, were also caught by this and it was not even meant to be anything more than a good April Fool's joke. Imagine how it might have gone if the jokester had gone to the trouble to set up a phone line, add a message, send out a press release, and target someone specific to make them look a fool.

Anyway, I guess this adds a new category of unpleasant and intrusive "reporting" - in addition to ambush reporting we now have hoax reporting, or is it scam reporting? It makes for good theater, unarguably, but it is no more news reporting than the opinionated blather that takes up most of the time on the so-called "news" channels.

As news-like performance art goes, at least this was creative and a bit entertaining, even if it was pretty mean-spirited.

dicksond wrote: A good hoax can make anyone look bad. Why just recently (last week to be precise), I was talking to a friend and they asked me if I had ever been to that restaurant out in a water intake crib on the lake, and I was obliged to explain that they, too, had been taken in by a good joke. I understand a few others, professionals even, were also caught by this and it was not even meant to be anything more than a good April Fool's joke. Imagine how it might have gone if the jokester had gone to the trouble to set up a phone line, add a message, send out a press release, and target someone specific to make them look a fool.

Crib won a WS award. But rejected it.

dicksond wrote: Chowhound was embarrassed as well ... just as LTHForum could have been.

Who would do such a thing?

I actually think the joke wouldn't succeed here, because sooner or later someone who is known would try to eat there and find it didn't exist.

On Chowhound, you could make up an ongoing dialogue between fake personas, and nobody could really tell they weren't real people. In fact, shills did that once or twice, back in the day.

No doubt there are other things you could do here, but I tend to think this particular thing would reveal itself fairly quickly.