Is your bottle of wine a fake?

A new scandal involving fraudsters counterfeiting high-end Burgundy highlights a long-running problem for the wine industry. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Fraud alert: an Italian police/Europol wine-counterfeiting raid similar to last week’s

• Time flies but it’s a year this week since I re-launched my blog here on Substack. Thank you to the 450-odd readers who have subscribed so far and to those who have followed on the app: I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I enjoy writing it!

Aside from the serious criminality involved, it was a deliciously exciting story in the staid world of fine wine. Last week police in France and Italy swooped on a gang of wine forgers who had been faking top Burgundies for sale at up to €15,000 (£12,450) a bottle. The authorities have been reticent about the wines concerned, though Paris daily Libération reported that they included ones from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (aka DRC), probably Burgundy’s most revered producer. In the UK, a single 2020 bottle of DRC’s top wine, Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, will set you back upwards of around £20,000.

Now the London Evening Standard has reported breathlessly that “fake vintage wine floods London.” I’m not going to worry too much, though if this weekend my wife asks, “Pop down to the offie and get us a bottle of DRC and some nuts, will you?” I’ll certainly be vigilant.

Nevertheless, counterfeiting has become a serious headache for the fine wine trade. It is generally reckoned that anywhere from five to 20 per cent of fine wine on the secondary market (ie sales not including those by the producers themselves) is counterfeit. Indeed the World Trade Organisation has estimated that a fifth of all wine sold is fake. Mass-market wines such as some from Australia’s Penfolds have been targeted in China. That’s a rather different story to the DRC fraudsters – although in intriguing ways, quite similar too.

High-end producers have responded with an array of security features including invisible ink, holograms visible only under ultraviolet light, laser etchings on bottles and electronic RFID tags built into the capsules. But those are only on recent vintages – and of no help in detecting fakes in the even more lucrative trade in older bottles.

It is not clear what vintages the gang caught last week were counterfeiting, though they did it using faked labels – which suggests at least post-World War II vintages, using modern bottles (fake older vintages demand genuinely old bottles.) The alleged mastermind, Russian Alexander Iugov, was arrested by Italian police at Milan airport while meeting the printer of his dodgy labels. The gang reportedly made over €2 million and have a track record: Iugov was sentenced to four years in prison in 2017 for the sale of 400 fake bottles of DRC.

The obvious question for any non-professional is: how could the buyers not just tell by tasting the wine? Never mind poring over the label for tiny errors – could they not tell they’d been scammed as soon as they opened this bottle of elixir and realised it was actually cheap plonk?

In truth, it’s not so simple – though the basic point does sort-of hold, with all the embarrassment that implies for fine-wine specialists.

For a start, such high-end wines may well be bought for investment: they may never get opened by their first buyer, who eventually sells them on to someone else. Whoever does one day open them is unlikely to uncork more than one bottle at a time – and if it turns out to be rubbish, there is always the chance that it was a bad bottle. Plus there is a strong possibility that they’ll be too embarrassed to admit that they thought it was sub-standard, or that they realised they had been scammed.

Nor do we know what the fraudsters were putting in the “DRC” bottles: it wasn’t necessarily rubbish. If they substituted, say, a £300 burgundy, they’d still be making a handsome profit, and whoever opened the wine would need specialist knowledge to know that this was merely a stunning, grand red Burgundy rather than an actual DRC on an off day.

This is precisely the difficulty exploited by the two most notorious wine counterfeiters of recent years, Hardy Rodenstock and Rudy Kurniawan. Both successfully faked and sold not merely very expensive, high-end bottles but ones that were impossibly rare – or claimed to be. It is not an exaggeration to say their exploits traumatised the fine-wine world.

Rodenstock, real name Meinhard Görke, was responsible for the most scandalous-ever wine fraud, the sale of a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite that had purportedly belonged to US President Thomas Jefferson. Engraved “Th. J.”, it sold in 1985 at Christie’s in London for £105,000 – and later led to lengthy legal action by the buyer, US billionaire Bill Koch. Rodenstock eventually settled out of court; he died in 2018.

More embarrassing for the wine trade were the lavish dinners that Rodenstock hosted in the 1980s and 90s, featuring dozens of extremely rare bottles, some from the nineteenth century. The veteran head of Christie’s wine department, Michael Broadbent, came out of it with a lot of egg on his face: as American writer Benjamin Wallace recounts in his riveting book on the scandal, The Billionaire’s Vinegar (2008), by 1991 “his reputation had become wholly entwined with Rodenstock’s.” Broadbent comes across as naïve, but he successfully sued for libel over some passages in the book. It was diplomatically ignored by the British wine establishment. But then even US uber-critic Robert Parker described a Rodenstock dinner he attended in Munich in 1995 as “the wine event of my lifetime”.

Rodenstock – and Parker – rode a wave of fine-wine money generated by the 1980s economic boom and its redistribution of wealth towards the rich. By the time young Indonesian playboy Rudy Kurniawan established himself on the US fine-wine scene in the mid-2000s, there was a new boom and even more US collectors willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on rare bottles. Kurniawan is estimated to have sold perhaps $100 million of wine, much of it fake – especially DRC, earning himself the nickname “Dr Conti”. He was finally exposed and convicted in 2013, serving seven years in jail before being deported from the US.

How did Rodenstock and Kurniawan do it? Both ran extraordinary counterfeiting factories in their homes, using hundreds of authentic old bottles, fake labels – and skilled blending involving some genuine old wines. Parker commented after Rodenstock’s downfall that the German had to be a blender of genius, because the improbable 1920s magnums of Bordeaux legend Pétrus that he’d served in Munich were “sensational” (Parker scored a 1921 magnum the maximum 100 points; Pétrus later said they made no magnums that year.)

Kurniawan was said to have an extraordinary palate, and in his kitchen, along with many empty and half-filled bottles, FBI agents found “recipes”, eg to make 1945 Mouton Rothschild, he used “one-half 1988 Pichon Lalande; one-quarter oxidized Bordeaux; and one-quarter Napa Cab." Even more bizarrely, Winesearcher.com reported last year that now he is free, Kurniawan is in demand to create reproductions of rare wines. Fraud expert Maureen Downey told the website that she had seen notes and pictures from a dinner in July 2023 at Singapore’s Pines Club, where seven guests paid him to create fake versions of 1990 DRC Grand Cru and 1990 Pétrus, which they tasted against the real ones. According to the notes, “most of the tasters preferred the fakes,” with one guest commenting, “Mr Rudy Kurniawan is a vinous genius.”

These master forgers were helped while breaking the law by the industry’s then-gentlemanly approach to such things. As Rebecca Gibb points out in her entertaining Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud (2023), venerable London merchants Berry Brothers established an in-house wine authenticator only in 2013.

But more than that, the simple truth is that no-one today really knows for sure exactly what a 1921 Pétrus tastes like. Any attempt to validate such vintages by tasting is never more than an educated guess. And even people who should know better sometimes believe what they want to be true: that this is an extraordinary bottle, a vintage untasted for decades.

I was thrilled by the oldest unfortified wine I’ve ever tasted, a 1916 CVNE Imperial Gran Reserva Rioja (it was real – the tasting was organised by the producer.) Incredibly, it was still alive – though to actually drink, I preferred vintages from the 1960s and 80s at the same (circa 2010) tasting. But the most amazing aspect for me was thinking about what was happening when the 1916 was harvested: my paternal great grandfather was in the trenches in France, my maternal grandmother a teenage schoolgirl. This is the magic of very old bottles that confidence tricksters like Rodenstock play upon.

Yet the obscure world of collectors of very-rare wines is only the more glamorous tip of the counterfeiting iceberg – because faking wine works for any well-known brand. And while the patrician owners of DRC are far too urbane to refer to their wines as a brand, that is functionally what DRC is.

A brand influences even very senior wine professionals. UK wine journalist Guy Woodward recently wrote about the “tyranny of the label”: he says that when he was Decanter editor, tasters at the magazine’s prestigious Bordeaux blind tastings invariably rated the top crus lower than other, less illustrious Médocs – only to be horrified, and insist on drinking the more famous bottles with lunch.

And brand influences ordinary shoppers at their local convenience store – which is why fraudsters target them too. In 2021, trading standards officers raided a supermarket in Sutton Coldfield and seized 41 bottles of Yellowtail that were subsequently confirmed by the producer, Australian wine giant Casella, to be fake. Chinese counterfeiters were suspected.

In all seriousness, I don’t know how you’d tell from the contents of the bottle whether it was genuine Yellowtail or a fake composed of some other, equally anonymous industrial swill.  They probably worked it out from spelling mistakes on the labels, a common fault at the cheaper end of the Shenzhen printing industry. Either way, making a profit by counterfeiting cheap mass-market wines requires significant volume – which would tend to confirm the higher estimates for the proportion of total wine sales that are fakes.

As the marketing-world saying has it, a brand is a promise fulfilled. Except when counterfeiters hijack your trust. Despite the worlds separating auctioned bottles of old DRC and branded plonk on an off-licence shelf, that is what they have in common – and it is why fraudsters will continue to try to make money from our faith in the label.

The real thing: a genuine 2004 bottle of DRC’s legendary “La Tâche” cuvée, a snip at around £5,000

What I’ve been drinking this week

Arcadia “Odrysia” Narince 2019, Eastern Thrace - I don’t think I’d tasted white Turkish grape Narince before arriving at a Greenwich Turkish restaurant with my niece and her husband last weekend, so I seized the opportunity. Made in Thrace out towards the Bulgarian border, this is rounded and quite creamy but still crisp and fresh – a pleasant lunchtime glass with mezze (Grocina, £13.99 and in off trade.)

Greywacke Chardonnay 2019, Marlborough – in the 15 years since Cloudy Bay winemaker Kevin Judd broke away to found Greywacke, the estate has built an enviable reputation. He’s best known for his Sauvignon Blanc but this Chardonnay, opened by my friend Tom last weekend, is serious stuff: toasty oak, rich and nutty but dry, long – a complex wine (quite widely available, from £27.)

Bodegas Ponce “La Xara” Garnacha 2022, Manchuela - a modern Spanish Garnacha in the lighter, more mineral style championed in the Sierra de Gredos, this one from east-central Spain is a delicious red. Mineral and a lot fresher than archetytpal big Garnachas, it’s beautifully balanced, brimming with sweet red fruit (Origin Spain, Vinatis, The Sourcing Table, Parched Wine, from £12.90 though more at most outlets.)