Sadly enough, all rare wine collectors today are at risk for fraud. It’s the role of a skilled broker to investigate the provenance and authenticity of any bottles you’re considering for purchase, in order to protect you and your money.
There are two famous instances of elaborate wine fraud that are so incredible they’re almost impossible to believe. One involved four bottles of late 18th Century Bordeaux that were allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson, and another centered on an Indonesian expat named Rudy Kurniawan.
In the first instance, American billionaire Bill Koch spent roughly $500,000 in the late 1980s on four bottles of wine: a 1784 & 1787 Branne Mouton (the predecessor of Mouton Rothschild), along with a 1784 & 1787 Lafitte (Lafite Rothschild). They all had supposedly been found a decade earlier in a bricked-up cellar in Paris, and were believed to be from a collection owned by Thomas Jefferson. The engravings etched onto the glass were evaluated by experts and deemed authentic, and other wines from the Jefferson cache had been tasted and pronounced real—and excellent.
Nearly two decades after the transaction, Koch’s staff decided to track down the provenance of the bottles and discovered them to be fakes. Jefferson experts from Monticello said they didn’t believe the story to be credible, and forensic scientists said the etchings on the glass were made by power tools. Through further investigation, it turned out that the bottles had all originated from a German wine collector named Hardy Rodenstock, who made several other too-good-to-be-true bottles. To this day he’s fighting multiple court cases against him for allegedly selling counterfeit wines.
The second famous case involving notorious counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan is even more surprising. In 2012, federal agents raided his home in Beverly Hills, California, and found several wine bottles soaking in a sink, a machine for re-corking, and thousands of fake labels for famous wines that he had printed. At that time, he was an incredibly well-known name in wine circles, as he had spent years flooding the auction markets with an incredible number of rare vintages worth tens of millions of dollars.
His whole scheme originally began to fall apart at an auction in 2008, when he put up for sale more than 250 bottles of rare Burgundy from three of the region's top producers, including bottles of Domaine Ponsot Clos de la Roche Grand Cru dating back to 1929. During the event, the proprietor of Domaine Ponsot appeared and informed the auctioneer that his estate didn’t start producing wine from the Clos de la Roche vineyard until 1934. Kurniawan responded to the controversy by implying that his supplier had duped him. “We try our best to get it right, but it’s Burgundy and sometimes shit happens,” he told Wine Spectator.
But the incident caused many people in industry circles to hunt for the truth. Koch, while still investigating the Jefferson wine, also discovered that 211 bottles in his cellar supplied by Kurniawan were suspicious and likely fakes. The FBI got involved, and after Kurniawan’s arrest, he was indicted on mail and wire fraud. Kurniawan was sentenced in 2013 to ten years in prison. It would seem that the lesson here is simple: if you dupe the wealthy, they have the means to get even. An extremely wealthy wine collector will actually spend ten times the amount of money he paid for the original fraudulent transaction on a lawsuit to prove a point.