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”
From the November 18th 2023 edition
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