Thursday, September 4 2008
Whine Spectator
Would you buy a used Mouton from this magazine?
Wine hoaxes, fraud and raw greed, part deux: Robin Goldstein's charming and amusing little hoax on the Wine Speculator Magazine brought forth the wrath, ire, discontent, and bunchy underpants of the magazine's editorial staff, and they rebutted him faster than murky sherry (winemaking joke, sorry), saying that they tried really, really hard to verify stuff and his fake list was good anyway, so what's the harm?
Turns out they're like a cat trying to cover up on a tile floor. Robin deconstructs their arguments on his blog:
1. WS writes: "We make significant efforts to verify the facts...We called the restaurant multiple times; each time, we reached an answering machine and a message from a person purporting to be from the restaurant claiming that it was closed at the moment."
If it's true that WS called the restaurant's number (+39 02 4074 6174) multiple times during their "efforts to verify the facts," and had trouble getting through, why didn't they ever leave a message? Or send an email?
The only message WS ever left at the restaurant's number was left after the award had already been granted, by an advertising salesperson asking if I wanted to buy an ad (starting at $3,090 and going up to $8,860).
The ad department also emailed me–again, after I'd already won an award (but, interestingly, before the level of the award was determined).
In short, the only "significant efforts to contact" the restaurant were made by Wine Spectator's ad sales department, and were made after the Osteria had already won an award.
Hey Marv, is that a real Cuban?
Ho ho ho! He goes on to note:
WS writes: "A total of 102 [out of 256] wines earned ratings of 80 points (good) or better."
Setting aside the fact that the "reserve list" contained the most expensive and lowest-rated wines, this is their justification for why the list was "excellent" overall? If you look at all wines in Wine Spectator's database, 167,710 of 190,071 wines ever rated–88%–earned 80 points or higher. Only 40% of Osteria L'Intrepido's wines did. Even if you look only at the 117 wines on the Osteria's list that were rated by WS, 102 of 117 (87%) earned ratings of 80 points or higher–lower than the average of all wines that WS has ever rated (88%). Is that their definition of "excellence"? Below average?
My uncle Vlad Ilyich used to say, 'When you don't understand, follow the money'. In this case the awards of excellence that WS sells er, ah, awards, they generate an enormous amount of revenue for the magazine in terms of advertising. That kind of money buys a lot of things, but in this case, apparently not objective opinions.
Read the whole story at Robin's blog--he's worth reading.
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