Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with the Alan Sokal hoax. Sokal, a physicist from NYU, pulled a classic hoax on an academic journal called Social Text by writing a paper that was, quite literally, gibberish but that flattered the ideological preconceptions of the journal's editors. Needless to say, the editors were so excited to have a genuine physicist confirm to them that there is no real world and that the laws of nature are merely a "social and linguistic construct," a "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook" that they printed that gibberish. They were quite embarrassed to see an article in another journal come out the same day to reveal the hoax to the world. A similar hoax has now been perpetrated on the magazine Wine Spectator, the editors of which have now granted a prestigious award to a non-existent restaurant.
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" (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. (Not surprisingly, the Osteria's listing has since been removed from Wine Spectator's website.) I presented this result at the meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Portland, Oregon, on Friday, August 15.
To make the hoax even more amusing, the most exclusive and expensive part of the wine list was taken from the pages of this very magazine -- they were wines that Wine Spectator had panned in its reviews:
The main wine list that I submitted was a perfectly decent selection from around Italy that met the magazine's basic criteria (about 250 wines, including whites, reds, and sparkling wines-some of which scored well in WS). However, Osteria L'Intrepido's high-priced "reserve wine list" was largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.
Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark. Brilliiant, Mr. Goldstein.
Politics
Comments
I think it's awesome and hope it's true. This isn't a hoax on us though, right?
Posted by: apy | August 28, 2008 9:47 AM
Cheers! (burp.)
Posted by: Karen | August 28, 2008 9:58 AM
There's an American Association of Wine Economists? What do they do exactly -- get drunk, belch random numbers, and publish them as projections?
Posted by: Raging Bee | August 28, 2008 10:02 AM
Reminds me of Jean Shepherd's classic "I, Libertine" hoax, where he and his listeners managed to have a non-existent book reviewed and placed on best seller lists.
Posted by: Joe | August 28, 2008 10:57 AM
Didn't this kind of thing happen with some MIT grad students who wrote a fake paper with a random-word generator and got it published?
Posted by: Jeff | August 28, 2008 11:38 AM
In a round-about way, this is kind of encouraging, at least it means that the winners are not just the ones who've signed on with the highest advertising account.
Posted by: Spike | August 28, 2008 12:00 PM
Oh, it's true all right. Even more amusing is watching the magazine's executive editor (and various sycophants) tie themselves into rhetorical knots defending this listing and the general practice on the magazine's forum board.
Posted by: Calton Bolick | August 28, 2008 12:02 PM
Posted by: James Hanley | August 28, 2008 1:28 PM
This is a perfect example of how the "post-modernists", from Derrida to the present, have misused Nietzsche's assertions about the construction of society and knowledge as an idea. Deconstruction is a tool for unpacking ideas; for finding their actually historical basis. Nietzsche used it to expose the intellectual underpinnings of Christian Europe, art, and the European concept of femininity; Simone Beauvoir to expose the way protective attitudes towards women really sought to deny them position and identity.
It is not a tool of science! If anything, it is an attempt to apply the kind of searching, objective approach which science takes towards concrete reality to the reality that humans create through our societies and literature. At its base was a recognition that a fundamental reality exists; that it forms the core of our world, both physical and mental. Foucault, Derrida, Hegel, and Plato are the grandest, most respected, most atrocious frauds in modern thinking. Those four are responsible for more toxic intellectual movements, more anti-human politics, and more just plain bad thinking, than any other thinkers recognized today.
Posted by: Julian | August 28, 2008 1:55 PM
The Ern Malley hoax is infamous in Australian literary circles. The fictitious poet and his works were created by a couple of soldiers towards the end of WWII, with the intent of deriding modern and surrealist poetry. Ern Malley's "poetry" was constructed with random quotes from dictionaries, shakespeare and whatever other printed works were at hand. The "poetry" was published in the avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins and lauded as the works of a genius.
Posted by: grasshopper | August 28, 2008 5:20 PM
What this shows me is that the Award of Excellence is really nothing more than an advertisement. You need do little more than pay the fee and look good and you get your name in the magazine.
Posted by: The Science Pundit | August 28, 2008 6:06 PM
I'm guessing they simply did not take the time to read it.
Back in grade school and junior high school, I had a series of poor history teachers, and by 10th grade I sat amazed as the bumbling man assigned us huge papers due at the semester--two days before the end of the semester. His grading system rewarded length specifically. He had 5 classes of 30, times the 10-20 pages to read in less than two days...
I managed to produce 20 pages or so of poor quality before the deadline, and decided to insert "Mr. Green is an ass" right in the middle (two or three places for good measure). The resulting A grade did not surprise me. Funny part was at year end I added all my point up and just barely had an A for the class--he did not add so well and gave me a B. No amount of argueing could convince him of his arithmetic error... oh well it was justice after all.
Posted by: Rich | August 28, 2008 6:29 PM
All this makes me glad I declined to subscribe to Wine Spectator, opting instead for a subscription to Wine Participant.
Posted by: AK47 | August 28, 2008 7:25 PM
It is startling how easily people can be fooled; individually as well as in groups of any size. Usually, as I think this episode exemplifies, it is a failure to check one's sources, to verify recent or new information. Easily done by anyone. I think I did it today. Still, it concerns me deeply that patent bull shit can pass as wisdom and become a cultural icon.
But I still have hope that something unusual will happen and as an unintended result the union will be strengthened. Given the current crop of presidential wannabes I can't see any other avenue.
E Pluribus Unum, hopefully.
Posted by: Crudely Wrott | August 28, 2008 8:35 PM
Great story, Rich! Thanks for sharing that--I'm going to show it to some of my teacher friends. It also reminds me of a running joke in grad school between a few friends and I (known then as the "conservative cabal" because we were all Democrats, rather than post-modernists or Marxists), that we were going to insert the words "Habermas, blah, blah, blah" in the middle of our dissertations. Being grad, rather than high school, students, we had either matured enough not to actually do it or had simply become old and timid. Whatever the case, my hat's off to you.
Posted by: James Hanley | August 28, 2008 9:20 PM
As an amature wino myself, I have long wondered about the Wine Spectator rankings. I know two decent restaurants in my area very well, and their wine services both have the same rating from WS. However, one is far superior in terms of quality, selection, price, and knowledgeable waitstaff.
I never understood, until now, how this could happen with restaurants with glaring differences apparent to anyone who ever set foot in them.
Posted by: Tex | August 29, 2008 3:12 PM
For fun with intentional hoaxes or plants in journalism, google "Reflipe W. Thenuz"--or in criticism, my personal fave, the famous Betjeman letter--google "AN Wilson" and Betjeman hoax.
ice
Posted by: ice9 | August 29, 2008 5:41 PM