The older I get, the more I’ve realized that most people are spineless cowards, especially if they’re chasing money, power, or prestige. That’s how businesses like Acker continue to thrive.
1 Like
The whole thing really sucks, and it often seems like the spirits industry doesn’t do enough to address the issue (though it is improving slightly, thanks in no small part to Adam).
It’s really frustrating to see legitimate buyers still reselling empty bottles on ebay. I get that people want to recoup some of the cost, but empty sales are what make a lot of this fraud possible.
1 Like
Agreed and why I sold my Pappy and Wellers. I’d be curious to know how many people know when they’re drinking a $1000 bottle of fake bourbon, provided there’s something decent in the bottle. We did a Wellers/Pappy 12 side by side and the difference was so incredibly subtle it’d be impossible to pick one from the other blind. That was when Weller was $35 retail and Pappy 12 was selling for several hundred.
Watching sour grapes right now…
I am sure that a lot of them don’t, depending what is used to fill the bottle / level of experience. As a policy we don’t drink the bottles Adam determines are fake, because once you know it’s not the real thing, who the hell knows what someone put in there. So I don’t have the best sense of whether people are filling Pappy 20s with something that is a plausible replacement.
I suspect that the Acker auction total includes the Hong Kong operation, and I believe they sold a significant stake – maybe a majority – to someone else a few years back. So, yes, the same brand, but if I’m right that it includes HK, this is not representative of their market share or reputation in the US.
I thought the article was ok. As someone who respects a good forgery, a really handmade product lovingly replicating the original in painstaking detail, I was disappointed to (1) see that the current Acker version doesn’t pass muster, and (b) be reminded by the NYTimes that the real money is in volume production of the cheap stuff. Does anyone know if Royal Wine Merchants still has those lovely 40’s de Vogue bottlings on the shelf? I think they are legally prohibited from selling them but I suppose they still could be there. They were always beautifully done, particularly in comparison to the grotesque magnums of Jayer that couldn’t fool a child. Might stop by after work and check it out for old times’ sake.
I just added up all their sales by domecile through the 3rd quarter as they are published in The World of Fine Wine:
The chart shows they did about $100M in sales across HK, USA and Internet. They only publish their non-internet sales which, through the third quarter, comes to 83M. This is consistent with Acker’s statements that roughly 17% of their sales come from the weekly internet auctions.
Of the 83M ex-internet sales, 65% were USA domiciled sales and 35% were HK. Now this doesn’t say where the buyers are from (they could be 90% from HK…who knows)
I was in there a few months ago and didn’t see any old gems of any sort that I recall.
Several years ago someone on here, maybe Maureen, had a post about the pervasiveness of fraud in the fine spirits market.
Thanks for digging up that info.
I’d recalled press releases about huge proceeds from HK sales – much higher than their US auctions. But that is a very vague memory from several years ago, and perhaps even if my memory is correct it was true in a certain time span.
To be sure there are some big HK numbers: the biggest single auction sale in 2021 was HK at 10M. The difference is there were 8 auctions held in the US through Q32021 vs 4 in HK.
Acker gets off incredibly easy in this article, toward the end of the article it actually discusses Rudy Kurniawan without mention of any Acker connection.