Famous Wine Counterfeits: What Each Case Teaches Buyers

Producers, not tasters, caught the famous wine counterfeits. In case after case someone checked the bottle against what the estate had actually made, and the arithmetic failed. Rudy Kurniawan offered eight magnums of 1947 Château Lafleur across his two 2006 sales at Acker, Merrall & Condit. David Molyneux-Berry, the former head of the wine department at Sotheby's, told the 2007 TASTE3 conference in Napa that only five magnums of that wine were ever produced. Laurent Ponsot killed a 2008 consignment of Clos Saint-Denis carrying vintages from 1945 through 1971 by pointing out that Domaine Ponsot made no Clos Saint-Denis before 1982. Christian Moueix confirmed that Château Pétrus holds no record of producing the Imperials that Hardy Rodenstock had been pouring. A provenance story is hard to disprove. A production record is not.

What did the Rudy Kurniawan case actually prove?

That a counterfeiter can operate at the top of the market for years so long as nobody asks the producer. Kurniawan began buying and selling rare wine in the early part of the 2000s, and by 2006 he was spending as much as $1 million a month on auction lots. He hosted tastings for other collectors and showed such affinity for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that the room started calling him "Dr. Conti". The selling side moved faster than the scrutiny. Consigning with John Kapon at Acker, Merrall & Condit in 2006, he netted $10.6 million in the first sale and $24.7 million in the second. That second sale set the record for a single wine auction, beating the previous mark by more than $10 million. Days later he took an $8.84 million loan from Acker, secured against the wine and art in his own collection.

Then the mechanics came into view. On 8 March 2012 the FBI arrested him at his home in Arcadia, California. In the house, agents found inexpensive Napa wines annotated to show they would be passed off as older vintages of Bordeaux, along with corks, stamps and labels. Later investigation established the method: buy old but cheap Burgundy, then relabel it with a prestigious producer name and vintage. A jury convicted him on 18 December 2013. He was sentenced on 7 August 2014 to 10 years in federal prison, released in November 2020 and deported to Indonesia.

The number that should worry any collector holding old Burgundy is not the sentence. It is the estimate in the 2016 documentary Sour Grapes that as many as 10,000 counterfeit bottles created by Kurniawan may still sit in private collections.

How were the fakes caught when the bottles looked right?

By the producer, not by the taster. Every one of these lots came apart on what the estate said it had made.

In April 2007 Kurniawan consigned several magnums of 1982 Château Le Pin to Christie's in Los Angeles, prominent enough to be on the catalogue cover. Representatives of Château Le Pin contacted the house to say the bottles were fake, and Christie's withdrew the lot. In 2008 he consigned bottles attributed to Domaine Ponsot from Clos Saint-Denis with vintages from 1945 through 1971, and Laurent Ponsot pointed out that the domaine had made no Clos Saint-Denis before 1982. Those lots came out too. Asked afterwards where the wine had come from, Kurniawan said "we try our best to get it right, but it's Burgundy, and sometimes shit happens."

The consolidated 2013 indictment ran on the same logic. It added a count for a faked jeroboam of Château Mouton-Rothschild 1945 sold in 2006 for $48,259, and a count for six bottles of Domaine Georges Roumier Bonnes Mares 1923 sold for $95,000 at a 2006 auction. Lead prosecutor Jason Hernandez put the second one plainly: Domaine Georges Roumier did not produce wine before 1924, so a 1923 has to be fake. When the trial approached, the judge let Aubert de Villaine of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Christophe Roumier and Laurent Ponsot testify on videotape rather than in Manhattan, because the court date collided with harvest.

Nothing in that list required a laboratory. It required a phone call to the estate, which is the cheapest authentication step available to you and the one most buyers skip. Our guide on how to spot a fake wine bottle covers the physical checks that come after that call, and reading an auction catalogue properly tells you what the house is and is not asserting about a lot.

What happened with the Jefferson bottles?

They were sold on an engraving and an inference, and the provenance behind them was never produced. Hardy Rodenstock, also known as Meinhard Görke, said he received a phone call in early 1985 about old bottles discovered in a walled-up cellar in Paris. The bottles carried late eighteenth century vintages and the initials "Th. J.", which was read as evidence they had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

On 5 December 1985 Rodenstock put one of them up at Christie's in London: a 1787 Château Lafite engraved "1787 Lafitte Th. J.". The catalogue listed its value as "inestimable". It sold for 105,000 pound sterling with Michael Broadbent on the gavel and Christopher Forbes bidding against Marvin Shanken of Wine Spectator, and as of 2007 that was still the worldwide auction record for a single bottle.

The unravelling started with a museum loan request. In 2005 Bill Koch, who had bought four bottles of Château Lafite and Branne-Mouton from the 1784 and 1787 vintages in 1988 for a total of about 500,000 U.S. dollars, prepared to exhibit them at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The museum asked for provenance. Koch's staff could find nothing beyond Broadbent's authentication, so they contacted the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. The foundation's curator answered that, on Jefferson's own records, it did not believe the bottles had ever been in his possession. Tracing back through the Chicago Wine Company and Farr Vintners showed all four had originated with Rodenstock.

Koch then hired a retired FBI agent and brought in David Molyneux-Berry as a consultant. Forensic work on the glass followed, and Koch alleged the engravings had been cut with an electric power tool, a high-speed drill of a type that did not exist in the eighteenth century. He filed in a New York federal court on 31 August 2006. Rodenstock refused to take part, and a default judgment was entered against him in May 2010.

Two details in that case are worth more to a buyer than the judgment. Rodenstock never named the person who sold him the bottles, never gave the Paris address, and never stated how many bottles were found, with figures quoted over the years ranging from "a dozen or so" to thirty. And when the German magazine Stern offered to have his remaining bottles analysed at its own expense by the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, he declined. A German court had already found in 1992 that he had "knowingly offered adulterated wine" for sale, a case settled out of court on appeal. Benjamin Wallace's 2008 book The Billionaire's Vinegar reported a tritium test and two carbon-14 tests dating the wine to circa 1962.

If a seller cannot say where a bottle sat for two centuries, you are buying the story, not the wine. That is the whole argument for treating provenance as a priced attribute rather than a nicety.

Why does bottle format matter so much in these cases?

Because fakes cluster in formats that are rare enough to be valuable and scarce enough that nobody has seen a real one recently.

David Peppercorn and Serena Sutcliffe questioned six-litre Imperials of Château Pétrus from the 1921, 1924, 1926, 1928 and 1934 vintages, served from Rodenstock's collection at tasting events in 1989 and 1990. Their concerns were never proven and Rodenstock disputed them, but Christian Moueix, managing Château Pétrus, confirmed the estate has no records of producing Imperials in those vintages. The 1921 Pétrus is the vintage Robert Parker awarded a perfect 100-point score after tasting it at the 1995 Munich event, and magnums of that wine sold by Rodenstock later became the subject of litigation.

Format shows up as a statistic too. In a March 2010 lawsuit against Christie's, Koch alleged that Rodenstock had distributed 818 bottles in the United States through Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin of Royal Wine Merchants between 1998 and 2008, virtually all rarities, of which 87% were magnums. Oliveros and Sokolin deny selling fake wine. In May 2012 the Second Circuit ruled the claims against Christie's time-barred and affirmed dismissal of that case.

Read those numbers as a screening rule. When a consignment is weighted towards large formats of scarce vintages, the population you are drawing from is small enough that the estate can usually tell you how many exist.

How much counterfeit wine is in circulation?

More than the famous cases account for. Wine Spectator has noted that as much as 5% of the wine sold in secondary markets could be counterfeit. The fraud is not confined to trophy Burgundy.

In 2002, bottles of the weaker 1991 vintage of Château Lafite Rothschild were relabelled and sold in China as the acclaimed 1982. In 2000, Italian authorities uncovered a warehouse holding nearly twenty thousand bottles of fake 1995 Sassicaia and arrested several people, including a salesman working out of the back of a Peugeot hatchback. In early 2007 it was reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into the counterfeiting of old and rare vintages.

Label fraud on this scale needs more than a printer. To be done well it requires the bottles, the corks and the packaging to be manipulated to match, which is exactly why the Arcadia search produced corks, stamps and labels alongside the Napa wine.

What other wine fraud should you watch for?

Two categories that the famous counterfeit cases overshadow. The first is adulteration, the older and more prevalent form: cheaper juice, sweeteners or colouring added to stretch or improve a wine. Jancis Robinson calls adding water to dilute wine "possibly the oldest form of wine fraud in the book." Pliny the Elder complained that fraudulent Roman wine was so abundant that not even the nobility could be sure what they poured was genuine.

The second targets your money rather than your palate: investment wine sold at inflated prices by firms that then go into planned liquidation, sometimes without the wine ever being bought for the investor. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry and the police have both acted on it.

What should you check before you bid?

Six checks, all of them drawn from what actually broke the cases above.

• Ask the estate what it made. Le Pin, Ponsot, Roumier and Pétrus each resolved a question that tasting notes could not. Production records, not palates, ended these consignments.
• Treat format as evidence. Eight magnums offered against five produced is the Lafleur case in one line. A consignment that runs 87% magnums is a pattern, not a preference.
• Demand a chain, not a story. No named seller, no address, no bottle count is what the Jefferson bottles came with, and that absence should have set the price long before the forensics did.
• Read the glass, the cork and the capsule. Koch's forensic work put the Jefferson engravings down to a high-speed drill of a type that did not exist in the eighteenth century.
• Look at who consigned it. In February 2012 Spectrum Wine Auctions withdrew lots worth an estimated $785,000 from a London sale when allegations emerged that they had been consigned by Kurniawan through a second party.
• Prefer wines with modern anti-fraud measures where you can. Producers now engrave serial numbers on glass and tighten distribution, and laboratory methods such as stable isotope analysis are growing in importance. Our note on authentication technology covers what these actually verify.

None of this is exotic diligence. It is the same work the estates did, applied before the money moves rather than after. If you want the full pre-bid sequence in order, start with how to buy wine at auction.

Where this leaves you

Counterfeits are priced into the market whether or not you price them into your bid. The wines most exposed are the ones with the thinnest production and the fattest premiums, and those are precisely the wines where a single unanswered provenance question should cost the lot its place on your list.

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