Robin Goldstein
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The year is 2008.
A man named Robin Goldstein is sitting at his desk with a question and a plan.
Goldstein is a writer, a skeptic, a researcher who has spent years poking at the wine industry's most comfortable assumptions.
He'd already written a book claiming that everyday wine drinkers, even experienced ones, couldn't reliably tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $100 bottle in blind tastings.
The wine establishment was not amused.
But now he has a question.
He wants to know exactly how Wine Spectator, the most powerful wine publication in the world, decides which restaurants deserves its prestigious award of excellence.
So he does what any self-respecting skeptic would do.
He builds a restaurant.
Not a real one.
A fictional Italian trattoria in Milan.
He names it Ostriola L'Intripido.
Italian for the fearless tavern.
A quiet wink at his own restaurant guide series, Fearless Critic.
He spends about three hours online.
He builds a website.
He gets a Milan phone number with an outgoing voicemail explaining the restaurant is temporarily closed.
The proprietors are on vacation.
He invents a menu of what he calls somewhat bumbling Nouvelle Italian recipes.
He posts a few fictional reviews.