Wine Myths: Fake wines are easy to spot

Contrary to the romantic image I have of wine counterfeiting taking place in some sun-soaked and sepia-tinted corner of the French riviera, the very niche crimes of wine forgers are still problematic within the industry. There are very real criminals out there with wine as their target; it’s expensive, it’s got caché, and there are people out there willing to pay over the odds to get hold of what they want. Like art thieves and bank robbers, wine swindlers operate with an air of mystique—there’s something charismatic about their chosen occupation that your average con artist can’t pull off. Perhaps it’s because you could say that much of the fine wine world dances on the knife edge of deception, a long con where wine vintages can gather the value of a small country’s GDP, and everyone plays along.

While the world continues to believe that some wines are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and while there are buyers willing to hand over that kind of cash, there is money to be made. Wine fraud is big business. The World Trade Organisation suggests that wine fraud accounts for around 20% of the wines in circulation; it could, of course, be higher. The thing is, nobody really knows, and that’s the point. Frauds like the notorious wine seller and negotiant Rudy Kurniawan get inside the industry and use its prestige to flummox and bewilder. When the FBI raided his home, bottles of Napa Valley red and Bordeaux were being relabelled as luxury Bordeaux wines, the same as counterfeits he’d been producing for nearly 12 years at this point. He was caught, not because somebody tasted the difference, but because he had made errors that gave him away—the chateaux themselves called auction houses to inform them of these mistakes. He was selling wines that had never existed in the first place.