AnuvaBlog

We’ve sometimes been critical of Wine Spectator, however, they are still one of the most-respected and most-read wine publications out there. So it was with great surprise and delight that three Argentine wines cracked the Wine Spectator Top-100 list released a few weeks ago. No, they were not any that Anuva Vinos features (2009 maybe?), but they were from small wineries with limited productions. Last year, the goliath Catena Zapata was the onlly Argentine wine to make the list, and this year aside from two Mendocino wines, the top rated Argentine wine was from Salta. As this year’s theme was all about ranking value, it’s great to see that the rest of world is noticing not only what great value that Argentine wines offer, but that some of the very best wines that this country produces do not come from Norton, Chandon, or Zapata. Not to mention that not the entire country, not just Mendoza, is producing great wine…

As many of you may have read in the news last week, Wine Spectator has gotten caught with their pants down a bit. Pretty much at their ankles.

Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials–a book that critiques the wine industry’s own methods of wine criticism, publicity, ratings, advertising and pricing–sent in an entry to apply for Wine Spectator’s “award for excellence” for restaurants and his Osteria L’Intrepido restaurant in Milan, Italy won.

The enormous, gargantuan problem with this, however, is that his restaurant does not exist. Oops!

Besides the obvious problem of not doing their homework–and perhaps worse than giving an award to a restaurant that doesn’t exist–is the fact that Wine Spectator itself had berated many of the wines that Goldstein put on his phantom list. I quote the Chicago Tribune article: “[the wine list includes the] 1993 Amarone Classico Gioe S. Sofia, which the magazine once likened to ‘paint thinner and nail varnish.’” Another wine that was included on the list was described by Wine Spectator as “earthy, swampy, gamy, harsh and tannic. ” So not only does Wine Spectator give out bogus awards, but they give awards to wines lists that include wines for which they have given terrible reviews. Oops squared.

As if that weren’t enough, Wine Spectator charges each applicant a $250 fee to “apply” for the award. They get roughly 4500 applicants per year. Let’s do the math: 4500 x 250 = 1.125 million dollars.

So let me get this straight, ostensibly the most prestigious, auspicious and well-known wine publication in the world not only gives out awards to entities that do not exist but they clearly do not check to see if those entities carry products that they have already declared in print to be inferior, flawed or distasteful and at the same time they make millions of dollars doing it?

What is unnerving to me is that our new publicist and I wanted desperately to find a way to put our product into WS. How can I now, as the sole full-time defender of my product, consciously make the decision to go after publicity in WS? The answer is that I cannot.