August 31, 2013

Lafite and Latour

‘Suspects were arrested in China holding more than 32 Million Dollars of fake wine by the Yanti police,’ the Wine Cellar Insider reports. Police apparently arrested10 suspects and seized more ore than 40,000 bottles of fake wine in one raid.

Some of the wines being counterfeited were Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Latour, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Beychevelle, Chateau Pichon Baron. ‘Lafite has become the poster child for forgery in China,’ the article says, ‘where it has been reported that there are more cases of the iconic 1982 vintage of Lafite floating about than were actually produced by the château.’

Penfolds and Henschke

Penfolds Grange and Henschke Hill of Grace are two Australian Labels the counterfeiters thought worthy of their attention. Here we strike a miraculous note – an alter ego label on a wine purported to be made by Max Schubert. Perhaps the Chinese are closer to heaven than we are.

Red Obsession, the new documentary that chronicles China’s infatuation with Bordeaux’s top wines, showed us knowledgeable investors. It seems far more affluent Chinese are not nearly so knowledgeable. ‘If you know wines, you can tell that they are fake, but not a lot of Chinese do,’ Cheng Qianrui, wine editor for the Chinese lifestyle website Daily Vitamin, told the Drinks Business. In other words, the fakes don’t need to be convincing, like the DRC white below that bears no resemblance to anything ever produced by the famous Domaine de la Romanee Conti.

Everything’s faked in China

So Maggie Wang tells Reuters. ‘For a lot of Chinese consumers, the more expensive it is, the more they’ll buy it. Chinese like things like that – they’ll buy the most expensive house, drive the most expensive car. They don’t want the best, they want the most expensive.’

Most of the big luxury brands have turned to proof tag systems, which use a variety of stickers with information encoded that cannot be removed without breaking them. Some even buy their empty bottles back or ask restaurants, hotels, collectors and auction houses to smash the empties to avoid rebirthing by counterfeaters.

EU is worried

Meanwhile, UPI.com reports that ‘European officials in China will attempt to strengthen protection against counterfeit wines and other spirits, the European Commission said Monday. European Agricultural and Rural Development Commissioner Dacian Ciolos began a series of meetings in China Monday to discuss protections against counterfeiting in the wine industry …’

Counterfeit wines being destroyed  – source: Reuters

The counterfeiting in China is clearly not in the same class as that practiced by Rudy Kurniawan on US fine wine collectors over the last decade. Some of those counterfeits will end up in China as well, but they’ll be much harder to detect. As the experts warned: these counterfeits will poison the fine  wine auction trade for decades to come.

Counterfeiting is here to stay

Mike Steinberger wrote in Decanter: ‘The counterfeiting problem didn’t begin with Kurniawan, and it won’t end with him. As long as there are people willing to pay thousands of dollars for a bottle of wine, there is going to be an incentive for other people to produce fakes.’ And here, the Chinese are no different from their western counterparts: ‘Old, expensive wines have become trophies for the most affluent among us; a bottle of Cheval Blanc 1947 or Romanée-Conti 1945 is as much a bragging right as a Gulfstream jet or a Ferrari.’

Rudy Kurniawan remains in jail, awaiting trial in New York state. His case was scheduled for trial this September, but Rudy asked for more time so he could hire a new defense team.

More reading:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-11/an-insiders-guide-to-counterfeiting-wine

Kim