Any reason to suggest that this isn’t an open invitation to fake wine?
Expensive empty bottles with no cork.
Poll:
1.) Rudy and John are their buyers.
2.) Rudy and John are their sellers.
3.) Both.
I loved calling a full bottle of Pichon Lalande 1979 brand new
I remember a poster here who collected Mouton Rothschild empties for the labels. He said he was fine with having the seller(s) drill a hole in the bottom so it would be obvious that the bottle was emptied at one time.
I remember when those prices would be for full bottles.
New listing, not bottle.
WS 93 pts! 1979 Chateau Pichon Longueville Lalande Bordeaux wine, Pauillac
Condition:New
This has been a huge problem with bourbon for years. Empty Pappy bottles sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, then are refilled and sold on the secondary market.
Agree. Odd or wrong, or both.
The wine may fly under the radar on price alone, but the entire reason to fake Pappy and BTAC is there are no anti-counterfeit measures making it quite easy, and the price on those bottles usually has an extra 0 compared to this specific wine.
Yeah, in general I’m not a fan of these sales.
But- there are some non-nefarious possibilities. A local interior designer routinely asks me for fancy empties. She uses them to stage houses and for decoration, sometimes clients just want to appear as if they drink finer wines than they really do.
She’s forbid me to recycle any of my Kenwood 1994 Artist Series.
Not expensive enough to fake.
That is why I drink cheap 1994 California reds: unprofitable AND difficult to imitate.
Some of those sellers make arrangements through carefully worded eBay messaging. Pay the small fee for the “empty” and the balance after the sale with PayPal to avoid eBay sellers fees. Same with beer & booze since eBay only allows wine.
Probably get a bulk discount!
Check back in a year and they will all still be there.
I do not know if they ever put it in the documentary, but when CNBC interviewed me about 9 years ago on the general wine fraud situation (initial story research interview- I did not sit for any interviews to be used in any of the final presentations), I gave them the details of something very interesting happening on eBay at the time.
This was 2012 and the Asian wine market boom was just starting, with 1982 Lafite the darling at the time including its all time high of $5,000 per bottle for an OWC lot sold at auction.
During that time, empty bottles of 1982 Lafite started showing up on eBay with regularity. At any given point in time there were 1-2 empties for sale and they almost all sold for $200+ each. And only 1982 Lafite empties were fetching that kind of money. Even first growth empties back to the early 1900s were not fetching that much. And, as I just noted, at a time when 1982 Lafite was THE wine to have. There was not a pattern of repeat sellers either- all over the map- suggesting lots of small time opportunists, though- to be fair- maybe not all fully aware of what was going to happen to those empties.
So, yes, in my opinion eBay has at times been a critical venue for counterfeiters looking for authentic vessels with which to fill wine.
In the grand scheme of things, Rudy way very sloppy. Guys like Rodenstock, and surely others we have never heard of and will never know, were much smarter in using original materials whenever possible to the fullest extent possible. The hardest counterfeit to identify is one that resides in an authentic vessel.
The best defense against the most convincing form of counterfeiting is to destroy empty bottles after consumption- even if you have to do it at the restaurant. On more than one occasion, I have taken a garbage bag with me to a tasting in NYC, filled it with empties, and then smashed them up in the alley after dinner.
Which alley? Manhattan is generally devoid of alleys.
(just a tease. I know you mean sidewalk.)
Wouldn’t it be easier to just irreparably deface the labels? Just write “FAKE” in industrial red sharpie on the label and swipe the corks. At that point, all that’s left is the glass itself.
Actually I was thinking of that little alley just down from Peking Duck House (Midtown location.) Walls painted black, trash cans- but I never really looked carefully. If there is doorway or two back in there, I owe someone a big apology…