Reported by: Richard Nalley

According to a study by industry group ABL (American Beverage Licensees), wine fraud today is an estimated $9 billion a year global problem, costing thousands of legitimate industry jobs and depriving governments of billions in tax revenues. The criminal activity encompasses Ponzi schemes, burglary, bank fraud, con jobs, smugglers, mysterious warehouse fires, and cutting-edge counterfeiters. It thrives both as a scaled-up, wholesale activity and as a bottle-by-bottle retail pursuit, as in China, where, according to one report, a full bottle of Bordeaux’s Château Lafite Rothschild 1982 goes for $5,900, and an empty of the same bottle—which can then be refilled—for $1,500. 

The wine business may learn to look back with a tinge of rueful nostalgia on headline-making con artists like Germany’s Hardy Rodenstock in the 1980s and ’90s, and Los Angeles-based Indonesian national Rudy Kurniawan in the aughts. They were kitchen-sink blenders, the wine-world equivalents of the gifted forger who paints Pollocks that confound the experts. 

Neither was exactly small time—Kurniawan is estimated to have sold some $34 million worth of questionable wines.

“A lot of people out there hear ‘organized crime’ and think Mafia,” says San Francisco-based Maureen Downey of WineFraud.com, one of the world’s foremost authentication experts. “But this is much bigger, internationally organized; scary stuff from Asia and Russia. This isn’t Joey Donuts.” 

Today’s crooks, in Downey’s estimation, learned a lot from Kurniawan’s downfall. “No 1: Don’t make ‘old and rare,’ because that’s difficult to pull off,” Downey says. Instead, current large-scale wine fraud operations are likelier to concentrate on recent vintages, and sometimes less expensive wines. “It’s not only $1,000 bottles now,” she says. “We’re seeing $40 bottles of Brunello counterfeited. It’s one of the rules of counterfeiting, you know? You can either make a few $100 bills or a whole bunch of fives.”

Read full report: https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/wine-detectives-and-the-fight-against-fakes-01662998446