Wine Spectator Goes on the Offensive!

WINE TALK
1

Did you see the article on fake wines?

WOW

WOW

WOW

2

?? [scratch.gif]

3

Is this news bigger than the “biggest news to ever hit Napa?”

http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/showthread.php?t=175718&highlight=montelena+sale" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

4

Nice Serge!

This weeks’ WS has Bill Koch on the cover, with a very well written and well researched article about the auction business.

Many new revelations, beyond what has already been discussed.

5

Why not? newhere

6

Dan,

I’ve been hearing about this article for 6+ months. I didn’t read anything that was much of a revelation. I was expecting more considering how long they have been working on it.

What did you find were the most interesting point ?

7

Beware of the 11 bottle lot is good advice.

JD

8

Ray

I had heard about it for a while as well.

The most telling for me is that this is clearly no fluff piece. I had no idea Marciano sued Zachys over the alleged fake 1982 Petrus that they sold him in 1991. I say alleged, as it is.

I also did not know Rudy sold wine through Christies in September, but that is just me not paying attention.

I found the whole thing, when it all comes together like this, much like Benjamin Wallace’s book, fascinating.

9

Notice in that thread I was the first to call Montelena…that shows you what a non event that was.

10

Yep

[wink.gif]

11

Have auctions always had this degree of fakes? It seems to me that treating wine as a liquid investment lies at the crux of the problem. Does anybody have some data on whether this was as rampant in the pre-Parker days?

12

There’s is no data since nobody really knows for sure what bottles are 100% legit and which are not whether today or a decade or two ago.
However, until recently, as in the last 15-20 years or so, wine really wasn’t that expensive so it wasn’t worth the effort of counterfeiting. As the price has gone up, so has the counterfeiting.


13

Ray – I think you need to qualify “wine wasn’t really worth counterfitting” with “most.” I know that when Aubert de Villaine began working at DRC, he was working on sorting out fake wines. Also, there are various notorious episodes that go back well beyond 20 years ago, such as fake bottles of 1975 Mouton-Rothschild that were discovered in the late 1970s, the 1947 Romanée-Conti that, as I recall, was on the winelist of one of New Orleans’s celebrated restaurants 30 or so years ago, and the case of DRC Montrachet with the Appellation Romanée-Conti on the label that a Beverly Hills wine merchant sold to a Japanese collector in the early 1980s.

What has happened is that the amount of fakes has increased dramatically as (1) interest in wine has grown hugely, (2) with it, the number of high-priced wines worth the effort to fake has grown, and (3) the means for making fakes (e.g., high quality copying machines) have advanced greatly.

14

Claude,

Of course you are correct. I thought that was implied in my post.

15

Is an “11 bottle lot” the opposite of a bakers dozen — a wine auction dozen?

16

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17

Anybody have the article they can send to me? Thanks in advance!

edit: Got it! Many thanks!

18

Ha ha! Jack’s Back! Well, not really, but sort of!

19

I enjoyed the article, though as Ray says, there wasn’t a lot in it that I found new.

The two new things, to me, were that Rudy continues to sell wine (and I’m surprised Christie’s is acting as an agent and on record states they don’t tell buyers who is the consignor) and that Ponsot suspects the forgeries may have been done by buying a cache of unlabeled, old Burgundy wines from a nearby (to Ponsot) negociant.

That was interesting; would explain how it might have been done.

20

Ponsot has told me that he knows who produced the “1959 Clos St-Denis” and that it in fact was 1959 Clos de la Roche. He also said he will be going to the US early next year to talk to the FBI.