Gundlach may not have done a lot of prior inspection/research on the bottles he purchased…but he’s combative and litigious (I say that as a fan too) so he may end up whole anyways. Whoever sold him the bottles is unlikely to have the legal resources to outfight him, and finding some peaceful way to slink off may be their best long run bet.
And then there are those litigious people who are like that because they have so much money it’s their way of marking territory, even when they got just what they ordered. Had a litigious wine buyer place two orders and paid for the first. Makes a second order two weeks later. Three months later he claims he didn’t place the second order, which went to the same address and was signed for. The wine was $1,250. The attorney to take him on was $4,500. Lost $1,250 to save $3,250.
So, Maureen, are you the unnamed person who determined the wines were fake?
I’m guessing you are, based on your tweet content, so you have knowledge about the transaction nobody here is privy to and probably can’t share at this point in time. My question is why not prosecute versus law suit?
Some thoughts:
- I wonder how Matt’s Company wine company is doing.
- Maureen, what is the Chai Vault? (I don’t read all posts here so if there is a relevant thread to point me to, okay!)
- Maureen, I would be glad to train with you!
- Finally, why should the buyer of a $1m lot - done privately, not through a public auction house with a more developed reputation (but even in that case, too) - not invest in a second opinion. Why not pay Maureen (or someone) to authenticate the purchase, not just trust the vendor? In coins, their are grading companies, two in particular most reputable. But there is now also a grading company for those grading companies, to make sure the coins they grade are not overgraded. So a, for example, MS 65 gold coin certified by PCGS with a sticker saying CAC (certified acceptable) will be worth more than an MS 65 coin with no sticker.
But then of course there are those who poo-poo the sticker - and grading companies altogether - because they can evaluate the coin themselves. Like those who buy for the inside rather than the outside of a bottle.
Karl,
Exactly what I’ve been saying. These people would think nothing of having an independent outside expert examine other high dollar purchases but when it comes to wine it’s “different” somehow and they only take the word of the seller.
I also don’t buy the argument that these people don’t read wine boards or wine magazines. That’s utter rubbish. They learn about wine like the rest of us do and in this day and age discussion about fake wines is everywhere. It’s on wine boards, it’s in wine magazines, it’s in wine shops, and it’s been on the news in every major news publication in most countries. In my experience with very wealthy people they actually tend to spend a large amount of time studying about things they are very interested in. Simply as they have the time and resources to do so.
In this particular case how much would it cost to have someone like Maureen inspect his million dollar plus potential buy to make sure what he is buying is legit. What a $1,000? $2,000?? Hell, even at $5,000 that’s chump change for a guy like Gundlach. Especially when he’s buying some of the most sought after and the most faked wines in the world…again, common sense.
Great post.
Two things,
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Many of you are forgetting that, unlike cars for example, high end wine as a luxury product with a broad commercial appeal (and thus a large audience of buyers who are not as savvy as collectors) is a relatively new thing.
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Even if the buyer exercises less than the required care in due diligence before buying- that does NOT excuse the seller from responsibility for the quality and authenticity of the product being sold.
Buyer education is very important- but the real burden here is on the vendors who sell the products.
Please allow me to explain just how much the market has changed,
I have been collecting wine for over 20 years. I have also been appraising cellars and assisting with broker references for over 15 years. I grew up around fine wine. My tasting experience, market experience, collecting experience, and first hand auction observation experience far outweighs what 98% of the people on this forum can claim.
And I will tell you right now, that I am a babe in the woods when it comes to dealing with the secondary underground market that has arisen in recent years- and when it comes to cellars like that I have to defer to Maureen and her team. Just read through some of the posts and discussions- we are at a point where examining sediment in a bottle is now an important factor.
How do you expect a new collector to have this degree of knowledge? How do you expect that person to even know to think of such things?
This post was about a wine buyer who was defrauded. I do not care what he does for a living, or if his portfolio performance is up to snuff. None of that is relevant, and to even go there is a disservice to the cause.
And while it might be a good idea to get a second opinion- that has to happen after you have the bottles in hand for the most part. The logistics and cost of getting beforehand are troublesome- as well as the fact the appraiser would need to hand deliver the wines to the buyer immediately after the evaluation to avoid all sorts of potential shady behavior.
If we ever get to that point where it is presumed that the buyer must rely on a second opinion- you can kiss the secondary wine markets goodbye, along with all the investment and care put into making wine at its best versus what we had out of Bordeaux in the early 1970s.
The ultimate responsibility is on the seller- who is making a profit on the transaction- period.
We have long since been there and secondary wine markets are going nowhere. They are stronger than they ever have been.
How do you expect a new collector to have this degree of knowledge? How do you expect that person to even know to think of such things?
They never will have that knowledge, that is why there are experts like Maureen. That is why there are automobile experts, coin experts, and the like. The world is full of cheats and cons in every arena. Somehow people think wine should be different. Perhaps it’s that whole bygone era of chivalry that persists with wine. I prefer not to live in a bygone era, you can.
Tom Reddick wrote:
And while it might be a good idea to get a second opinion- that has to happen after you have the bottles in hand for the most part. The logistics and cost of getting beforehand are troublesome- as well as the fact the appraiser would need to hand deliver the wines to the buyer immediately after the evaluation to avoid all sorts of potential shady behavior.
I agree that if one is spending $500 it’s not worth the money. We are talking MILLIONS of dollars spent on wine. The cost to send someone like Maureen to investigate such bottles prior to purchase is a tiny fraction of the overall cost and something that happens with a lot of high dollar purchases. If a seller won’t allow it that should be a major warning flag and one should walk away.
Please don’t tell us the logistics are troublesome. When dealing with people with that much net worth and able to spend that amount of money, logistics are quite easy.
Of course the seller carries a lot of blame for the case described in this thread. If they sold the bottles knowing that they were fake, that’s clearly fraud; if they didn’t know that they were fake, this should obviously be made public and one would hope this would damage their reputation. Cases of buyers shipping fake wine back to the vendor and signing an NDA are prolific and harmful to the world of fine wine; vendors that then sell these on again should be prosecuted and publicly shamed.
However, saying that, I do think ‘victim shaming’ is not entirely unwarranted in cases like these, though I wouldn’t use that term for what is in effect calling out someone who made a foolish and relatively un-researched purchase. Perhaps this kind of thing might make others think that more of the onus lies on the purchaser, rather than crating an image of them being doe-eyed, innocent victims. They are clearly in a position to spend a lot of money on something that they don’t really know enough about - in doing so they are contributing to the perpetuation of the concept of fine wine as a status symbol and an object for investment alone. It is this kind of attitude to wine that is largely responsible for leading us to the position we are in, in the first place. Like any other hobby that requires that requires a lot of time and knowledge, you cannot expect to be able to bypass this by simply putting a lot of money on the table. There is no doubt that wine-collecting is, to some degree, a meritocratic process - if someone takes these kind of shortcuts I don’t really have much sympathy for them I’m afraid.
Look at their website http://www.soutirage.com.
Soutirage isn’t some regular independent retail shop – they clearly market themselves as advisors, a relationship-driven buyer’s agent who will seek out and procure the things their clients desire. Inherent in that implied value proposition seems to be that they’ll use judgment, experience, and discernment in their recommendations. So it’s not surprising that representations (or guarantees) about authenticity and/or provenance might have been part of what they offer, and in that context a reasonable basis for a claim if not delivered upon.
In the case of Latour 1928, Haut-Brion 1945, Cheval-Blanc 1947, Lafleur 1947, Lafite Rothschild 1953, Mouton-Rothschild 1959 and Pétrus 1961, I think it’s much more akin to antique Ferraris. This is not current release Harlan or Screaming Eagle or Mouton.
I completely agree that the vendor has to be held responsible. Still, when you’re talking about million-dollar purchases, a buyer who doesn’t know enough to be highly suspicious of '45 and '47 first growths is extremely careless.
This is quite an interesting thread b/c I do agree with some many of what you all said here, including some who are somewhat but not entirely in opposition.
Eric’s point of view is quite good.
The logistics of getting a second opinion don’t seem too hard. Collections of this sort are not bought one day and drunk the next so it shouldn’t be too hard to get Maureen up to Napa to see the collection at Soutirage.
I don’t know where she lives but her byline here says SF Bay area/London/Asia so presumably she is in the Bay Area with some regularity.
I do agree with her that, too, though, that we don’t need to snicker at those who did either get swindled or the short end of a stick from an incompetent or swindled advisor.
But for the types of dollars we’re talking about a second opinion to me does make sense. I could see that Gundlach might not know of Maureen and her services, and no doubt Soutirage sells itself as being all you need. And presumably they have had many satisfied customers, including perhaps Gundlach himself earlier.
And I admire what Soutirage does; it is the sort of job I would like to do myself. And I agree that the kind of knowledge you need is something that takes time to acquire. I have been collecting wine for 22 years and still have much to learn. That’s why it’s so fun!
I would think that they buyer of a 20m home would not just take the realtor’s word for it that the house is sound. Heck even for a 200k home you pay an inspector to check the place over. And because this is a used product that does not have the warranty of the maker a second opinion to me makes sense. (In this example Soutirage would be the realtor.) If you’re buying a 20m newly built yacht and something goes wrong with it presumably you can some kind of recourse with the maker.
And I have had a conversation with John about the best way to operate a retail wine store which sells old, from-cellar wines. And I agree that to have credibility the vendor must stand behind the product.
Which may be what Soutirage does. The fact that it has made news though makes me think that was not their initial response.
It’ll be up to the Chinese honestly. Xi, make it happen.
As it is pertinent to the discussion, I post here, a snippet from Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880). Twain and his traveling companion are in an ancient hotel in Heilbronn, Germany:
_**When we got back to the hotel, King Arthur’s Round Table was ready for us in its white drapery, and the head waiter and his first assistant, in swallow-tails and white cravats, brought in the soup and the hot plates at once.
Mr. X had ordered the dinner, and when the wine came on, he picked up a bottle, glanced at the label, and then turned to the grave, the melancholy, the sepulchral head waiter and said it was not the sort of wine he had asked for. The head waiter picked up the bottle, cast his undertaker-eye on it and said:
“It is true; I beg pardon.” Then he turned on his subordinate and calmly said, “Bring another label."
At the same time he slid the present label off with his hand and laid it aside; it had been newly put on, its paste was still wet. When the new label came, he put it on; our French wine being now turned into German wine, according to desire, the head waiter went blandly about his other duties, as if the working of this sort of miracle was a common and easy thing to him.
Mr. X said he had not known, before, that there were people honest enough to do this miracle in public, but he was aware that thousands upon thousands of labels were imported into America from Europe every year, to enable dealers to furnish to their customers in a quiet and inexpensive way all the different kinds of foreign wines they might require.**_
So, it has been ever thus…
I think both sets of comments here are fair. It’s fair to expect buyers to exercise a reasonable level of due diligence when making 7-figure purchases. The fact that Gundlach is rich shouldn’t ipso facto make him a target for ridicule, but it would be ironic if he exercised less caution in making a huge wine purchase than he (presumably) does in his business affairs. (Or, as Andy says, he would do if buying a property or a fancy car.)
On the flipside, however, it’s even more incumbent on a vendor (broker) selling in this price range to know the market and exercise the same care on behalf of their customers that they would if it was their own money. All the more so for a business like Soutirage that seems to play particularly heavily on relationships and trust. (From their website: “Relationship-based purveyors of fine wine, spirits, and the lifestyle that accompanies.” “Through personal relationships with our clients and suppliers, Soutirage redefines and elevates the experience of procuring wine.” “Our long-standing partnerships in the global wine community enable us to secure impeccable bottles of the greatest wines in the world.”)
I agree it’s premature to make judgments based on a complaint that tells only one side of the story. Maybe we’ll learn that everyone involved here exercised as much diligence as they possibly could have, and they still got fooled. But it’s hard for me to see how a broker that is selling its expertise in “secur[ing] impeccable bottles of the greatest wines in the world” ends up blameless after selling 60+ bad bottles to a single customer. It’s somewhat more believable that Gundlach could have reasonably relied on Soutirage to confirm provenance, but getting $1M deep in fakes before checking them out can’t have been a proud moment.
– Matt