Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

It appears that Goldstein set out to do a hatchet job for the start.

The WS forum outlines the run up to the ‘award’ - including the fact that the complete list included some 250+ wines (majority OVER 80 pts), that the WS had attempted to contact the restaurant by phone (the number had an answering machine) and that there were customer reviews of the restaurant on Chowhound (seemingly created byt Goldstein).

I am still waiting for WS or Goldstein to publish the entire wine list.

I don’t think this fiasco discredits the WS as it does Goldstein. He did not reveal any big secret.

Arthur,

Maybe, maybe not. I do know more than a few restaurant owners who think Wine Spectator’s annual “excellence” issue is nothing more than a petty cash shakedown. Many refuse to play - and these are restaurants with great wine lists.

Besides, to paraphrase Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder,” a nutless monkey could put together a wine list with a solid majority of 80+ Wine Spectator-rated wines. How many bottles get below 80 in any issue? Five? Ten?

In the June 30th issue - “Great American Pizza” - there are six out of what must be at least 200 wine reviews.

Best,

Brian Moore

Brian,

Then why go to the trouble of running a ‘sting operation’. Goldstein has a website of his own. He has a blog there, I believe.

It would have served his credibility to write a good essay laying out his case, point by point.
As you and I both have said: there is much skepticism about these ‘awards’.

I think it only serves Goldstein’s ego (and possibly book sales) to stage this whole “exposé”.
But then again, he seems to have a penchant for this sort of thing.

If Goldstein did not reveal any big secret try googling “fake restaurant gets award”. Keep paging thru; it slows down at about page 10. It appears a few people think this story reveals something.

Imagine what would happen if critics everywhere were examined closely about their objectivity and their professional practices? What if the public became skeptical of the self appointed judge? The main stream wine and food media will not let this happen. Goldstein prepare yourself. You are the bad guy and the Wine Spectator is a helpless victim of your treachery.

Come now, Morton.

I don’t think anyone is saying that WS is an innocent victim. However, Goldstein’s methods were tacky.

Arthur,

I’ll grant you tacky! But tacky can be funny.

In any event, here’s an old exchange between the food writer for the Dayton Daily News and WS publisher Marvin Shanken on the awards: http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/wine/entries/2006/07/24/wine_spectator.html

By the way, does anyone know why Cigar Afficionado’s cigar reviews seem tougher than Wine Spectator’s? It’s not exactly John Simon versus Peter Travers, but the bar does seem a bit higher for cigars. Maybe there’s more swallow than spit at those double-blind tastings.

Best,

Brian Moore

Thanks Brian,

I’d seen that piece Mark had done.

That (and the fact that all the info is on the WS site) is why I am perplexed why people act like this Goldstein thing is such a huge revelation.

<<That (and the fact that all the info is on the WS site) is why I am perplexed why people act like this Goldstein thing is such a huge revelation.>>

It’s not the revelation, but the method thereof, of course. It’s vivid, and WS’s response - a lame accounting of their hapless due diligence - made it worse.

I’ll grant you one more thing - if the same scam had been perpetrated on something I liked, I’d probably be the first dude in the comments column calling it “Michael Moore bullsh*t.”

All this did remind me that I like wine, so I’m going to get me some this evening.

LOL

Well, I am neither a fan or anti-fan of the WS.

I’ve had serious reservations about Goldstein’s previous stunt with The Wine Trials, but I truly tried to put them aside when I first learned about this ‘sting’ on Alder’s blog.

The more I looked at the whole picture, the more my opinion leaned to wards the current - ie: “hatchet job”.

I must be missing the big picture. Let’s see a large company is making a million dollars a year selling awards. They present the awards as something achieved for excellence in a guide to readers. You want to talk about tacky? That’s tacky.

No someone using a stunt publicizes that the award is, in fact, paid advertising. So we say the guy who exposes the scam has the low ethical standards. He’s the tacky one.

The Wine Spectator apologists point out that the whole thing is spelled out by the Spectator on-line where you can see the criteria and the number of stores getting each level of award. Take a good look. Anything missing? Since they have the numbers you’d think they might have also have provided the number of award applicants. Except that particular number presents a little PR problem doesn’t it?

This is a big thing because outside of the wine business ,where we accept this sort of thing as business as usual, the public actually has been led to believe awards like this mean something.

Haha, I couldn’t help but wonder based on the comments above.

Was there a non-tacky way of going about an operation which intends to reveal the authenticity of scoring? By nature of the experiment, there had to be a controlled setting (aka, the fake restaurant) which replicated what other restaurants would look like which would submit to this award. The experimental group comes from the wine list which is made of a collection of low-scoring wines in previous WS issues. People may say that the concept of questioning authenticity of the WS itself is tacky, but the experiment doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

When it comes to grace, Goldstein didn’t have to shout her findings from the rooftops of the internet, but at least she didn’t hold it against WS and blackmail them for big money. Now, that would be tacky.