Our Newest Press

Virginia Wine Lover's Magazine has just done a great little piece about the Enomatic Wine Stations featuring our little wine bar on the front page of the article. Click here for access and check out the pictures.

The Enomatics keep generating quite a buzz and for good reason, there is no other way I know of to be able to open and make available to patrons the special, high-end or limited production wines we keep in our Enomatics. The machines allow us great flexibility and volume. 32 wines by the glass, sample or half-glass would be impossible without this technology. Further it allows us to keep the quality of the wines very high since spoilage is a non-issue. The Enomatics allow us to offer great value for the caliber of wine being poured. We love 'em.

Is Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence a Sham?

Long before reading Dr. Vino's blog I have wondered about this subject. On several occasions (not always, some have indeed been great) I have visited restaurants with their Award of Excellence posted prominently only to look at their wine lists and wonder what was excellent about it. Now it turns out that an intrepid blogger was able to get the Wine Spectator award with only a phone number and clumsy website.

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.

Further, the author of the phony restaurant says:

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.

As a restaurant owner this leaves me in a real quandary. The award does seem to impress people, and probably solidifies a restaurant as a wine destination in consumer's minds. However without any sort of measurable standards the award is meaningless.
Thoughts?