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Pastimes : Wine You Can Enjoy @ Under $20 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (742)	8/24/2008 6:53:33 PM
From: SG	Respond to of 1277

Good post, funny, thanks. A good summer cheapy..Polka Dot Riesling. SG

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (742)	8/24/2008 7:29:40 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1277

Amusing, but I can't say that I agree with a lot of it ... unless one is purchasing wine based more on ability to pay than on what one wants. There are any number of $10-30 wines that I think are the equal of anything, regardless of price, so why would I spend $200 a bottle except to show off? Yeah, OK, there are some more expensive wines I like too and I do break down and buy limited quantities of them, but in terms of average price I just can't see spending even $100/bottle.

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (742)	8/24/2008 7:30:08 PM
From: MulhollandDrive	Respond to of 1277

this is rich: drvino.com If you decided to get a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for you restaurant wine list, what would you need? The answer according to Robin Goldstein is $250 and Microsoft Word. Restaurant not actually required. Goldstein, the author of The Wine Trials, has a posting up on a new web site describing how he invented a restaurant name, Osteria l’Intrepido, a riff on “fearless.” Then he typed up a menu (”a fun amalgamation of somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes”), put together a wine list, and submitted both to Wine Spectator–along with the $250 fee. The list was approved and given an Award of Excellence (see screenshot). Then Goldstein decided to add a twist. To the tape: It’s troubling, of course, that a restaurant that doesn’t exist could win an Award of Excellence. But it’s also troubling that the award doesn’t seem to be particularly tied to the quality of the wine list, even by Wine Spectator’s own standards. Although the main wine list that I submitted was made up of fairly standard Italian-focused selections, Osteria L’Intrepido’s “reserve wine list” was largely chosen from among the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past 20 years. Click through for the list complete with WS annotations and scores. Reached by phone today, Goldstein said that he also presented this information at the annual meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Portland over the weekend. “I didn’t have any empirical evidence of the quality of the restaurants other than my own impressions,” he said. “I wanted to see what the standards of the Awards of Excellence were. The results speak for themselves.” His experience will be part of an academic paper he is working on about standards for wine awards. In 2003, Amanda Hesser explored the Wine Spectator restaurant awards in a piece in the Times entitled “A Wine Award That Seems Easy to Come By.” She concluded that the 3,573 restaurants that year grossed Wine Spectator $625,275. But the annual application fee then was $175 as opposed to the $250 that Goldstein and others paid for their application fee this year.