How to get an "Award of Excellence"
by Volker Weber
My name is Robin Goldstein, and I’m the author of a new book called The Wine Trials (book here; website here). Lately, I’ve become curious about how Wine Spectator magazine determines its Awards of Excellence for the world’s best wine restaurants. 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”. ...
Osteria L’Intrepido won the Award of Excellence, as published in print in the August 2008 issue of Wine Spectator. ... While it’s interesting that the reserve list would receive such seemingly little scrutiny, the central point is that the wine cellar doesn’t actually exist.
[Thanks, Karen]
Comments
Weighty UK coverage of this in The Times today: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/wine/article4592961.ece
Thanks, Vesey. Same link as a link. :-)
Most industry "awards" such as this one are really designed to promote the organization giving the "award", not those who receive it.
Examples abound, all over.
The NY Times also had an article about this a few days ago.
Years ago, we had favorite clients who were PR/Marketing folks. When I commented about them getting some award, they confided to us that that whole business gave itself LOTS of awards because customers were impressed by them.
It's really hard to tell from outside when an award is real. I can tell you the SOA awards on which I'm a judge (whatEVER made me say Yes to this?!) is real because I just spent the weekend reading all the submissions. I think it would have been more fun to eat a bug.
Should vowe ever have an award for Best Comment, I wish to submit Esther's:
I think it would have been more fun to eat a bug.
LOL!
