So big it will poison the auction market for rare Burgundy for years
‘Millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of counterfeit wines are sold every year,’ said energy billionaire William Koch after he won a lawsuit against a consigner who’d sold him counterfeit bottles of old Bordeaux, some of it from Jefferson’s time. ‘The counterfeiters don’t want anyone to know, for $100 they make it and mark it up to $15,000, I myself paid $100,000 for a counterfeit wine. To me the whole industry is corrupt.’
Wine scandals are pretty common, perhaps because wine is such a fickle commodity. Even experts and experienced people in the trade are often taken in, which brings us back to one of my favourite topics: the difficulty of judging wine. The older the wines are, the more difficult they are to judge.
The usual kind of wine scam involves passing off cheap wine as something better and getting more money for it. That’s what happened from 2006 to 2008 in the USA, after the movie Sideways had ridiculed Merlot and Americans turned to Pinot Noir. E & J Gallo was found to be selling an $8 French Pinot Noir under its Red Bicyclette label that was mostly made from Merlot and Syrah – some 18 million bottles of it, worth nearly $5.5 million.
