Fun and Fitness for the 40-Something

Wow! The LA Times ran an embarrassing article the other day about a hoax that was pulled on Wine Spectator. It might make you think twice about relying on the magazine’s awards when picking a restaurant.

It seems Wine Spectator granted an “award of excellence” to a restaurant whose wine list featured a wine the magazine once compared to “paint thinner and nail varnish.” Worse yet—the restaurant doesn’t even exist!

The perpetrator of the hoax, a wine critic, created a faux web site and menu for the restaurant and submitted a wine list, along with the $250 entry fee. According to the Times, he hoped to “expose the lack of any foundation for many food and wine awards.”

The article reports that, this year, “nearly 4,500 restaurants spent $250 each to apply or reapply for the Wine Spectator award, and all but 319 won the award of excellence or some greater kudos.” That’s more than $1.1 million in fees—not a bad little revenue generator.

Just some food for thought the next time you pick a restaurant based on an award…

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Just for Fun, Products and Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.