Wine fraud has existed for hundreds of years. Pliny the Elder talks about it in his writings from Ancient Rome. It’s the reason behind the sommelier giving you the cork when they open your bottle of wine at the table.
France is the home of most of the rituals around wine. They have always used wine as a major export. Barrels of wine were being transported as early as 1200, or before. Bottling wine at the winery didn’t become common until the late 19th century and early 20th century. Before this many wines were still sold in barrels. Bottles were breakable, inconsistent, heavy and expensive. Wineries within France who were making more expensive wine were more likely to bottle- they were more likely to be trying to protect their name. Wineries started putting their name on their wine corks so that the final consumer could check the cork against the label on the bottle to ensure that an unscrupulous tavern owner wasn’t pouring cheap wine into old bottles.
We are still struggling with this same fraud today – though the unscrupulous one isn’t the tavern owner. There are entire businesses built around fraudulent bottling. Sour Grapes, a documentary on Netflix, documents the story of Rudy Kuriawan, a wine fraudster who sold $28 million dollars worth of fake rare vintages. He was mixing good wines like a two hundred dollar bottle of an off vintage off red burgundy from the 1970s and another two hundred dollar bottle of a current vintage then labeling it as a collectable year that would then sell for over two thousand a bottle. He did this for over a decade. He was then convicted and spent ten years in jail before being deported back to Indonesia. Late last year another wine fraud group was busted in Europe. They weren’t quite as successful as Rudy, they only made two million. That we know about.
Auction house stats say that 5% of wines submitted to the house for auction are found to be fraudulent. We don’t know about the stats for wine sold between collectors privately. Collectible wine is like art- it should be verified by experts. I am not one of them- I would refer you to an auction house! I can evaluate your collection and tell you what needs to be confirmed by experts but I don’t have the equipment or historical knowledge to examine a bottle of 1928 Bordeaux and assure you that it is what it says it is. There are few experts in the world who do this work. There are scientists who are working on other ways to detect fraudulent wine. There was a research paper published by a group of Brazilian researchers ten years ago working to create a system for testing the bottle through measuring the isotopes without opening it to confirm a general location of origin and age. This science is still in the experimental phases, vineyards have not been mapped at an isotope level. The buy in from vineyards isn’t there yet. It’s not an inexpensive test or feat. My money is on Bordeaux doing it first.
The crazy part is- that still may not be enough. Because there have been fraudsters for hundreds of years. In 1928, some guy was in a back room pouring less expensive wine into bottles from a more expensive, more prestigious winery. Phiny the Elder dates back to 79 AD and even he writes about wine fraud.
So if you are buying wine from another collector, do your research. Ask for provenance if they have it. If it seems too good to be true… it likely is.
