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Three types of wine fraud
When rare wine sells for thousands of pounds a bottle, it's not just the connoisseurs that take note, says Chris Carter.
In May this year, a case of 12 bottles of the semi-mythical 1988 vintage Romane-Conti was put up for auction with an estimate of £140,000. That works out at a heady £11,666 a bottle, so it's little wonder the wine was a favourite of wine forger Rudy Kurniawan (see below). But producing fakes isn't the only type of wine fraud out there as these recent examples show.
The boiler room scam
Five victims have so far come forward, having lost a combined £300,000, including retired head teacher, Hilary Cooper, who was defrauded out of £137,225. In addition, £51,104 is owed to the taxman in unpaid income tax. Piper was sentenced to five years in jail on Monday.
The Ponzi scheme
Eventually, customers grew tired of waiting and asked for their wines. Fox covered their orders using money from new, explains Michael Steinberger in Bloomberg Businessweek. But things started to unravel in the wake of the financial crisis and a string of poor Bordeaux vintages from 2011, which dented demand. Yet, Fox continued to spend on cars and women he met online, quickly maxing out his credit cards. A bankruptcy auction was held late last month for the remaining 71,000 bottles in the company's warehouse, but many customers will have to go without.
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Unbeknown to his victims, Kurniawan was pouring cheaper wine into expensive bottles. He got away with it because there were few who could claim to have drunk the most expensive wines. If you had a generous host, says Cumming, "it is poor guestmanship to lob aspersions on any proffered bottle, let alone one that cost as much as your car".
But Kurniawan got sloppy. Wine maker Laurent Ponsot was surprised to find vintages of between 1945 and 1971 of his family's Clos St Denis. The wine was first made in 1982. Then billionaire Bill Koch found fakes in his collection and hired private detectives to investigate. Kurniawan was rumbled. In 2014, he was sentenced to ten years in jail. The story is the subject of a new documentary, Sour Grapes, by Briton Jerry Rothwell and American Reuban Atlas, released last Friday.
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