Interesting finding

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
-Ferris Bueller

You just don’t see enough honesty these days.

Fantastic!!

t-minus 2 hours until…

  • This gets blown wide open by the blogosphere & twitter
  • an editor loses her job in California

Ian, this is your best find since the 2010 Wine Spectator Top 10 Wines debacle! [cheers.gif]

The funny thing is that this review was published in July of last year, and seemingly thus far, no one caught it.

Oops.

Sounds like nothing more than a good wine and an inside joke. Much ado about nothing…

S.H. Is Steve Heimoff in this case, right? He is a paid reviewer for WE. Apparently he is paid per review. I am trying to understand whose library though. Is Lauren his editor or a Pax employee?

Not sure there’s any smoking gun here. I would interpret this as just being a note to the editorial staff indicating just what he said; the note was simply left with the tasting note inadvertently. Does anyone really think that professional wine reviewers are not paid for their work? Heimoff works for WE; he doesn’t run it.

Nate, I’m sure this is no harm, no foul on WE’s part, I just thought this was really funny that the foot note made the review.

Perhaps I’m missing something, or I’m just not understanding the seriousness of the review, but what’s the big deal? Genuinely asking.

I think the implicaiton is “I am charging the winery for the review” which is of course a bad thing. In fact, as stated above, he is likely talking about charging the magazine for the review and publishing it, which is of course 100% Kosher.

Only if he’s paid in Hannukah gelt.

Hi everyone,

As some of you have correctly surmised, Steve is compensated for each review he submits; the note was just his way of letting us (in this case, our Assistant Tasting Director Lauren Buzzeo) know that because the wine was not a current release, he would not be including it in his monthly invoice.

To avoid any misunderstandings, we’ve deleted the all caps in-house note from our database (it will disappear tomorrow after the public database is refreshed), but thanks to Ian for bringing it to our attention. It really shows the power of having an free and open system for the public to peruse at http://winemag.com.

Joe Czerwinski
Senior Editor and Tasting Director, Wine Enthusiast

Thanks Joe!

Aw rats, Joe, we’re really disappointed. No scandal! :slight_smile: