It looks like the Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator is not such a tough thing to achieve. The award that recognizes a restaurant for having excellent wine selections and service was given to a restaurant that does not exist. The fake restaurant was made up to prove that the awards are not really awards but paid advertising ($250 "entry fee"X4000 entries=a million bucks). Even better the fake restaurant's fake reserve wine list was made up of some of the lowest rated WS wines. We are talking a list of 50 point wines, not quite an excellent list. Dr Vino blogs about it here.
