Synonymous with refinement and history rooted in the terroir, great wines attract collectors and… fraudsters. The wine industry is in fact targeted by scammers who pass off exceptional wines as cheap. This crime continues to be tempting since it is as profitable as it is low risk for fraudsters, deplores the expert in grand cru authentication, Maureen Downey, nicknamed the “Sherlock Holmes of wines”.
Just this fall, Europol, the European criminal police agency, dismantled a vast counterfeiting operation of great French wines, which the fraudsters were selling for 15,000 euros (around $22,000) per bottle. The wine was made in Italy and the bottles, dressed with fake labels — one of the many methods of counterfeiting used by criminals — were to be delivered around the world to honest wine merchants who believed they were dealing with real wines. premium quality burgundy.
Simple anecdote or real problem? When Maureen Downey, founder of Chai Consulting, was asked how widespread this type of fraud is, she replied: “This is a question that has been asked for a long time. If we knew, that would mean that we had the situation in hand, which is not at all the case,” she said in an interview with The Duty from California. She points out that even terrorist organizations trade in counterfeit alcohol because it is a quick way for them to make money.
According to her, a good estimate of the proportion of counterfeit wine would be 20% of the bottles ending up on the market. And contrary to popular belief, fraud does not only target fine wines: a good part of this percentage includes entry-level wines, even from supermarkets. “For example, there are tons of counterfeit Yellow Tail bottles,” she says. A bottle of shiraz from this Australian wine retails for $13.05 in Quebec.
If we only talk about high-end wines, the proportion of fakes would be more like 5 to 10%, specifies the expert.
Selling counterfeit wine is lucrative, she says, and “easy” because the “supply chains are very opaque.” Everyone is fiercely protective of their sources, and even governments don’t know how certain bottles are sold, notes Mme Downey, whose work mainly involves managing private wine collections.
She points out that organized crime has also become interested in counterfeit wine, because the penalties are less severe than for other types of trafficking such as drugs or human trafficking. She gives as an example the case of Russian Aleksandr Lugov, arrested for the first time in 2017. For selling fake Burgundies, he was sentenced to four years in prison in France, with the possibility of parole after two years.
Big fraudsters
Rudy Kurniawan is probably the biggest wine fraudster in history. Maureen Downey knows him well: she was hired as an expert by the American Department of Justice, which investigated the flamboyant character and then indicted him.
The man carved out a solid reputation as a connoisseur in the 2000s in the United States, when he organized refined tastings and sold large quantities of extremely rare wine.
These are two men, with very distinct fields of interest, who ignited the spark of this investigation.
First there was Laurent Ponsot, at the head of the wine estate of the same name. He was perplexed in 2008 when vintages from the 1940s and 1950s of Clos Saint-Denis began appearing on the market. The head of the estate knows very well that his family started bottling this vintage in 1982. Sensing a scam, he carried out his little investigation, like the American billionaire Bill Koch. The latter, very unhappy at having found fake bottles in his collection, hired a private detective.
The FBI got involved as wine authentication experts saw more and more shady bottles at auction. In March 2012, US federal police raided the Californian home of Rudy Kurniawan, where a counterfeiting workshop was found. “Essentially, his entire house was a laboratory for making fake wine,” FBI agent Adam Roeser said at the time. There were old bottles submerged in sink water, hardening wax on corks, and labels bearing dates as far back as 1899. According to the FBI, Kurniawan filled bottles with false labels. grand cru with wines of lesser quality: he would have sold them for around 45 million dollars.
In December 2013, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury in New York, and a judge sent him to prison for 10 years.
Another case that caused a stir was that of the German wine merchant Hardy Rodenstock. He put up for sale bottles which would have been found in Paris behind a wall covered with bricks. Among the loot were, he said, bottles of Maison Lafite from 1787, supposedly intended for American President Thomas Jefferson — a great wine lover, who had been sent as an emissary to Paris in the years before the French Revolution. Letters had been clumsily engraved on the glass: “Th. J. Lafitte” [sic].
Despite the doubts expressed by experts, Christie’s in London sold one of these bottles to the wealthy Forbes family in 1985 at a record price for the time of $362,000 (in today’s dollars).
Bill Koch – yes, him again – is one of those who dragged Rodenstock before a New York court, after also purchasing “Lafitte” bottles known as “Thomas Jefferson”. In particular, he filed expert evidence according to which the engravings on the glass could only have been made with an electric tool, which obviously did not exist in the 18th century.e century. A judgment was rendered “by default” against Rodenstock, that is to say in his absence, because he did not even appear in court. In 2012, he was ordered to pay damages to Koch.
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