Just watched it on Netflix. Well done Maureen, Don and Laurent.
Watched it last night. Highly enjoyable! The scene where Hollywood Jeff and his pet terrier are cruising around with the bottle of La La trying to get everyone to agree how great the wine is, only to get completely shut down at the store was hilarious.
Very entertaining! Thanks Mo and Don. Ponsot is a funny guy.
Sorry that the most of the photos I have of Rudy also include you!
I thought the movie was very well done. The comments from Rudy’s defense counsel left me a little embarrassed to be a lawyer - I think "no comment " would have better served themselves and their client.
When I saw the below image during the movie, I screamed “I know who took that picture!”
High quality documentary. Hats off to all those involved in bringing this fraud to justice.
+1 on all accounts. I thought it was very well made.
I do think the movie convinced me that Rudy had significant help producing the fakes, which I hadn’t considered previously.
Who was ‘Christian’ in the LA store that shot down Levy & his venture cap douche friend about the La Mouline being fake?
Did people drink the fakes and think they were real or was he pouring real wines for these people?
That is one thing that was not clear to me.
Interesting, didn’t think of that
I think there was a mixture of both. There was no doubt that Rudy was a prolific buyer of genuine wines from merchants in Europe.
But if my theory about the Patriarche wines is correct, he had a vast store of vintage correct and appellation correct wines, even if they weren’t great. Not a great stretch to imagine some modification (adding a little young wine of a particular grower to an older bottle) to provide a touch of grower identity, with the added bonus of a period correct bottle.
If you combine this with serving of genuine bottles at dinners as a ‘convincer’, well…
Watched it last night, some observations…
-I am amazed at how Jef Levy seems to still be in denial that Rudy did it.
-Good shout out to WB!
-Rudy really was a poor con man.
-Some rich people are pretty dumb when it comes to common sense and not seeing the warning signs. Re-read the previous comment.
-Amazed more French producers didn’t get involved, other than Ponsot.
If you go back and re-read the entire Rudy K. thread, there was a lot of back and forth on this precise question. It was probably some combination of
real and fake, but different people have different views on what the relative %'s were and whether the relative %'s changed over time.
Bruce
Most of us will have observed the power of ‘group think’ in assessing wines. It’s often fun at a tasting or dinner to see how two groups at either end of a table group think themselves to quite different opinions.
One thing that struck me in the documentary is how on tasting a wine people would immediately tell those they were with what it tasted like. Maybe even listing half a dozen types of fruit. That is not something one often observes in Europe, and I think is a catalyst for group think.
It’s not hard to see how a couple of opinionated cool aid drinkers can assert opinions that self propagate.
A poor conman who sent relatives 17 million dollars in just one year…
This was definitely the highlight of a very well made documentary. I guffawed.
Well, compared to his uncles who absconded with a billion dollars worth of the Indonesian people’s money and still livin’ large… he’s a pretty sorry excuse for the family business.
A fair point, well made 
Loved that part.
I wonder if any of our community has met this guy, who proclaimed if you can’t drink '96, then drink '02, and if you can’t afford that, drink beer.