How to spot a fake wine
“Vintage Crime”, a new history, looks at “Winegate” and other scandals
To make a 1945 Mouton Rothschild, mix two parts Château Cos d’Estornel to one part Château Palmer and California cabernet. That was the strategy of Rudy Kurniawan, a wine fraudster, who poured his mixture of wines into old bottles with fake labels and sold them to gullible collectors. In 2014 he was sentenced to ten years in an American prison and ordered to forfeit $20m and to pay another $28m to victims.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Bottle shock”
Discover more
Germany’s former chancellor sets out to restore her reputation
But her new memoir is unlikely to change her critics’ minds
The best books of 2024, as chosen by The Economist
Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies
What to read to understand Elon Musk
The world’s richest man was shaped by science fiction
Tech and religion are very much alike
They both have gods, rich institutions and secretive cultures
Woodrow Wilson’s reputation continues to decline
A dispassionate new biography chronicles the former president’s hostility to suffrage
The cult of Jordan Peterson
What the Canadian intellectual gets right about young men