Wall Street not the only high-flying enterprise that lacks oversight

Earlier this week we posted an excerpt from an article in the Los Angeles Times about the lack of consistency in wine judgings. The article cites a recent study by retired professor and vintner Robert Hodgson that was published in The Journal of Wine Economics. (See "An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition.")

Many excellent vintners submit wines to wine judgings and wine publications only with great trepidation because of, at best, lack of consistency and at worst lack of fairness. While wine writers of old used to receive major perks and even be on vintners' payrolls, many of today's wine writers at least try to stay an arm length's away from the major corporations that now dominate the industry. But favoritism does creep in, particularly towards wines made in the international style du jour.

The article excerpted below shows how one wine writer easily fooled the world's most cited wine publication into issuing an award for a restaurant wine cellar that does not exist.

What does it take to get a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence?

August 20, 2008, by Robin Goldstein (Fearless Critic Media)

My name is Robin Goldstein, and I’m the author of a new book called The Wine Trials. Lately, I’ve become curious about how Wine Spectator magazine determines its Awards of Excellence for the world’s best wine restaurants. The following I presented at the Second Annual Conference of the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) in Portland.

As part of the research for an academic paper I’m currently working on about standards for wine awards, I submitted an application for a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. I named the restaurant “Osteria L’Intrepido” (a play on the name of a restaurant guide series that I founded, Fearless Critic). I submitted the fee ($250), a cover letter, a copy of the restaurant’s menu (a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes), and a wine list.

Osteria L’Intrepido won the Award of Excellence, as published in print in the August 2008 issue of Wine Spectator.

More here, with fake wine list. See also:

• "Does ‘Wine Spectator’ Profit From Awards?" (New York Magazine)
  
• "The Wine Spectator Award Hoax" (The Wine Economist)
• "Sour Grapes" (Diners Journal, The New York Times Blog on Dining Out)
• "Fake restaurant invented by author wins prestigious award" (The Telegraph, UK)
• "Drinking a hearty glass of blush" (Los Angeles Times)
• "The truth behind Wine Spectator’s 'significant efforts to verify the facts'” (Osteria L’Intrepido di Milano)
  
• "In Napa, Some Wineries Choose the Old Route" (New York Times)