Restaurants love to bandy about in awards they've received, often plastering their website, or even their eatery's window, with framed accolades delivered by various awards groups. Did James Beard think your roast duck was tops? Tell the world! And because every magazine believes its stamp of authenticity is worth something, many have developed their own awards, which make for excellent listicles to be trumpeted on the cover with numbers in their headlines. (For some magazines, these awards are also excellent revenue centers.)

Wine Spectator, then, is a magazine that hands out awards to restaurants that meet its strict criteria in offering customers a robust and well-selected wine list to accompany their roast duck and pappardelle bolognese. Its Awards of Excellence tell readers which restaurants around the world are their best bets for finding the perfect cab sav or pinot blanc.

Sometimes, though, Wine Spectator will — after vigorous scoring, lengthy research, and heated debate — recommend you visit a restaurant that does not exist.

Which they just did. Never heard of Milan's Osteria L’Intrepido? That's because it's not a real restaurant, though Wine Spectator certainly believed otherwise when, in the August issue, it handed Osteria its Award of Excellence. Except it was all a giant hoax, executed brilliantly — and simply — by an author and academic who was right to suspect Wine Spectator's admissions process:

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.

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.

Perhaps that's because the magazine does not, in fact, actually research the restaurants that submit an application. It simply cashes the cheque and seemingly hands out the Award of Excellence — the third-lowest of the magazine's official recognitions — at whim to a certain percentage of restaurants.

With 4,000 awards granted at $250 per app, that's at least $1 million in fees. This has left executive editor Thomas Matthews furious — and justifiably defensive.

[Osteria L’Intrepido di Milano]