The harm isn't in giving an award to a fake restaurant. The harm is that he submitted a wine list that included, in its premium "reserve wine list" section, a large number of wines that the magazine had said were crappy. (I find it disingenuous of WS to state the total number of wines submitted, while the writer made it very clear he filled out the routine wine list with acceptable wines, and it was the premium list that he was deliberately filling with bad wines.)
The magazine says it reviews the wine lists presented to it. So why did they give an Award of Excellence to a mediocre wine list, where none of the high-end wines were worth the money? All the surrounding circumstances are just window dressing. He could have submitted the list under an existing restaurant's name, or invented one, but either way, it was not an "Excellent" wine selection, it was overpriced vinegar.
The post from WS says that the award is the lowest of the three they offer, but the name of the award certainly doesn't make it sound like that. If a third of the submissions don't get the award, that means two-thirds do. To me, getting into the 33rd percentile isn't Excellence, it's Acceptable or Good or something along those lines.
When a reader sees that a restaurant has gotten an Award for Excellence from a wine connoisseurs' magazine, they assume that this means that a wine connoisseur would agree that the wines there are excellent, especially the premium wines. Not that they might order the three most expensive wines on the list, and end up with "tanned leather", "light, watery and diluted", and a "memorably bad vintage."
What's the harm? The harm is that people end up spending their hard-earned money on what they believe is going to be excellent wine, based on WS's recommendation, and end up with crappy wine instead. |
