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THE faces over at the Wine Spectator are redder than a bottle of fine Bordeaux this week, after the highly respected magazine gave a prestigious award to a restaurant that never existed.

Wine connoisseur and watchdog Robin Goldstein, curious as to how the mag selected the world’s best wine restaurants, submitted an application for an “Award of Excellence” for a phony eatery he called “Osteria L’Intrepido” with a Milan address.

He set up a fake Web site, created a menu of “somewhat bumbling nouvelle-Italian recipes,” and invented a high-priced wine list that included “some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades” – among them, a 1982 Brunello di Montalcino that “smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.” Still, the imaginary eatery was honored in this month’s issue.

It was a shock to top local restaurateurs.

“We make an assumption that it’s an excellent magazine,” Gramercy Tavern beverage director Juliette Pope told Page Six. “Hopefully, it was just a fluke.”

Goldstein, author of “The Wine Trials,” wrote on his blog: “While Osteria L’Intrepido may be the first to win an Award of Excellence for an imaginary restaurant, it’s unlikely that it was the first submission that didn’t accurately reflect the contents of a restaurant’s wine cellar.”

Wine Spectator Executive Editor Thomas Matthews told us the magazine was the victim of a clever hoaxer, fuming, “This was a mugging. Why would he do this?” Asked whether heads would roll, he said, “Do you punish the victim of a mugging?” Matthews called Goldstein “a malicious person” who pulled “an act of malicious duplicity,” and he insisted the magazine never claimed to have visited all of the nearly 4,500 restaurants that paid a $250 fee to apply for the award.

But, he said, “Wine Spectator will clearly have to be more vigilant in the future.”