As wine prices, especially those of luxury labels, soared in the early nineties, incidents began cropping up much more regularly. In 1995, at a dinner in Hong Kong, a merchant from England’s Corney & Barrow was served a fake magnum of 1982 Le Pin. In 1996 an attempt to sell fake 1982 Le Pin was uncovered in the UK; the forger had simply relabeled and altered the corks of some 1987 Le Pin, which sold for £1,300 ($2,000) less per bottle. In the late 1990s a London customer became suspicious of a bottle of 1982 Pétrus he had bought from a New York wine merchant for $2,000. He took it to château owner Christian Moueix, who examined it in the presence of Wine Spectator’s James Suckling. The bottle seemed legitimate until the capsule was removed and the cork drawn; the cork had two small indentations on its sides, indicating that it had previously been removed. It also lacked a vintage mark; the old one had apparently been sanded off. Moueix and Suckling tasted the wine, which was obviously not a 1982; they speculated it was Pétrus, but a lesser and much cheaper vintage, such as 1980 or 1984. In March of 1998, Langton’s, an auction house in Australia, discovered some phony 1990 Penfold’s Grange, the most famous red wine Down Under.
Older fakes were a less common occurrence, in part because older wines constituted only a sliver of the market. But they were worth much more money than young wines, and easier to pull off. In 1985 two American businessmen bought a magnum of 1865 Lafite, supposedly from the legendary Rosebery cellar, for $12,000. When they opened it, at a $1,500-a-head fundraising dinner in San Francisco, several people present who had previously tasted 1865 Rosebery Lafites deemed it fake. Marvin Overton III thought it was 1911 Lafite. Robert Mondavi said the cork looked five or ten years old. One of the two businessmen who had acquired the bottle thought it tasted like a faded rosé. Then came the string of incidents involving questionable, Rodenstock-sourced bottles at mega-tastings in the late 1980s. And among the wines offered for sale by Christie’s in Chicago, as part of the sale of Lloyd Flatt’s cellar in 1990, was a bottle of 1947 Romanée-Conti that turned out to be a bottle of 1964 Échezaux with a dummied-up label. An Impériale of 1947 Cheval Blanc, auctioned at Christie’s in 1997, sold for $112,500 despite doubts by both the château and a leading Swiss collector that such a bottle was ever made at the château; nonetheless, the château had given the bottle its imprimatur by providing a new label. Near the end of 1997, a bunch of low-priced, fake 1900 Taylor Fladgate and 1908 Sandeman vintage Port appeared on the London market.
Also suspicious was the prevalence of certain old vintages that had only been produced in limited quantities in the first place. The high number of cases of 1945 and 1947 Mouton sold at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the previous twenty-five years raised eyebrows, given the relatively small production of those vintages. A German restaurant was reported to have served two cases a year of 1959 Pétrus for six years at tasting events; this was a wine that estate owner Christian Moueix had tasted only twice, and of which Pétrus itself owned only one bottle. By the late 1990s, Serena Sutcliffe was convinced that there were a lot of fake 1947s on the market.
AN ENTERPRISING FORGER could employ any of several methods to counterfeit wine. He might switch the contents of a case, substituting cheaper bottles for more expensive ones, confident that by the time the case was opened, years later, he’d be long gone. He could apply the same logic to bottles, soaking the label off of a more expensive wine and gluing it onto a cheaper one. When the bottle was eventually opened, he’d be forgotten, or the taster wouldn’t have the knowledge or confidence to know the difference. Alternatively, instead of switching the bottle or label, the forger could switch the wine itself, siphoning out a more expensive one and replacing it with something inferior.
Old bottles, either empty or terribly ullaged, could be bought and reconditioned. A trick with DRC was to scuff the part of the label bearing the serial number, as if it had been a victim of normal handling. Labels could be reproduced with a color photocopier. Colin Lutman, an English forger of Port in the 1980s, went to more creative lengths, having apparently blasted one bottle with a shotgun to give it the pitted look of age, sprayed others with aerosolized dust, stained labels with orange juice and tea, and used sepia ink to reproduce château names on the labels.
More-sophisticated methods were also available. At the molecular level, a forger could add a proportionate amount of C-14 to simulate a vintage. To fool noses and palates, he could introduce an essence that mimicked aged oak. Émile Peynaud, the great French oenologist, once conducted an experiment in which he left a red wine and a Sauternes in a warm, damp lab oven for three weeks. At the end of the period, the red wine was undrinkable, but the Sauternes tasted like an old one and was very good. In the late 1990s, “a German sommelier with a vast knowledge of rare, old Bordeaux” offered the Wine Spectator’s Suckling detailed recipes for specific fakes, including a 1961 Pétrus, any mature vintage of Latour, and a 1945 Mouton. These recipes mostly involved lesser vintages of the same wine, doctored a bit, or other good wines that resembled them. Suckling didn’t name the sommelier in the article, but Ralf Frenzel, Rodenstock’s old sidekick, later acknowledged it had been he. “Whoever says that these great wines cannot be duplicated is not being honest with themselves,” Frenzel had said, under cover of anonymity.
Wine was among the easiest collectibles to fake. As a luxury commodity—more like a Louis Vuitton bag or a Rolex watch than like a unique painting by a famous artist—a bottle of fine wine wasn’t carefully tracked in its peregrinations. “This is the only product in the world,” Robert Parker said later, “that you can sell for thousands of dollars without a certificate of origin.” The rare-wine world, clubby and closemouthed, had allowed the problem to flourish by countenancing a gray market. And wine was made to be left alone in the dark for years, untasted and often unseen. Even when it was opened, tasting wine was rarely conclusive: few tasters were skilled enough to detect frauds, and an accused could always chalk up a strange taste to “bottle variation” or, with older bottles, the vinodiversity that characterized different merchants’ bottlings of the same wine. Experienced tasters had, after all, been divided about the questionable Rodenstock wines at the 1980s L. A. tastings. The limits of science precluded analyzing the wine itself without opening the bottle, a trade-off that owners of very expensive bottles were reluctant to make.
Of course, even if you did decide, when tasting a wine, that it was fake, you had also just destroyed the evidence.
THE MOTLEY WAYS to make fake wine were matched only by the variety of clues that could lead to its detection. Sometimes, instead of asking market value for a fake, and counting on the wine’s scarcity to generate demand among gray-market middlemen, a forger would make the mistake of setting a price that was too good to be true. Often the mimicry was shoddy and unresearched. In the Mouton episode in 1982, the gold lettering was neither embossed nor as brilliant as real gold leaf, the paper had a gray tinge, there were typographical errors, and the capsule lacked the real Rothschild seal. The 1981 and 1982 Pétrus faked in the mid-eighties bore wrong-colored foil capsules and stumpy, unbranded corks. The fraudsters behind the 1990 Penfolds Grange had meticulously copied the cases, packing tissue, and corks; their undoing had been spelling errors—“pour” was spelled “poor” on the label—and incorrectly colored bar codes (black instead of red).
In the matter of the five cases of 1986 DRC Montrachet arriving in Japan in 1990, the Japanese customer noticed that the labels read “Appellation Romanée-Conti Controlée” rather than the correct “Appellation Montrachet Controllée.” In hindsight, given that only two hundred cases of DRC Montrachet were produced each year, a five-case allocation to a single consumer was itself suspicious.
So was the 1947 Romanée-Conti from Lloyd Flatt’s cellar, since no such wine was ever produced. In 1945 the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had belatedly yielded to phylloxera and torn up all its vines, replanting with American rootstocks; from 1946 to 1951, as the DRC waited for the newly planted vines to mature, no wines were bottled under it
s label. Despite this small problem, neither Flatt nor Christie’s Chicago caught it; only when Christie’s published the auction catalog did a rival auctioneer helpfully call up and point it out.
Sometimes it was the wine inside the bottles that didn’t look right. Maybe the ullage was telltale: a fifty-year-old wine, say, that showed little or no evaporation. In the 1980s, Tim Littler, from Whitwhams, bought a Jéroboam of 1869 Mouton at Christie’s London. When he got home to Manchester, he left the bottle upright on a table. Later, when he turned to look at it, he could see right through. Alarmed, he held the bottle up to the light. The fluid inside seemed far too translucent for a red Bordeaux, and, strangely, no sediment was swirling around from moving the wine by train from London. Littler opened the bottle and, sure enough, it contained colored water. He called Broadbent, who called the consignor, a Danish restaurateur who became aggressive with the English auctioneer. Littler theorized that the bottle had been drunk decades earlier, then filled with colored water for the sake of display; the restaurant had then changed hands a few times, and the new owners had no way of knowing that the bottle contained diluted ink.
In 1987, a bottle labeled as vintage Port exploded in an office at Sotheby’s London. The cork shot out, hitting the ceiling, and wine sprayed all over the desk of Christopher Ross, the unlucky auction-house employee. The seal turned out to be candle wax dyed black, the contents a mix of Safeway-brand plonk and a partially fermented homemade concoction. Ross visited the consignor of the bottle, Colin Lutman, at home in Kent, and warned Lutman that he might have been victimized by a forger. Lutman had already sold several bottles at auction, including two bottles of “1924 Croft” at Christie’s. Ross also warned Christie’s about Lutman, and was told, incorrectly, that Lutman hadn’t sold through them. Lutman tried selling again through Sotheby’s, which called the police, who in turn contacted Christie’s, which had itself just had another three bottles consigned to them by Lutman. When the police arrived at Lutman’s home in Kent, they interrupted him in the midst of creating a new batch. He got off with a £750 fine.
In all these instances, something was visibly wrong with the wine or bottle or cork or capsule; no doubt, many more skillful fakes were simply never detected. The structure of the business was such that collectible wine often went unscrutinized, even as it was bought and sold and traded among merchants and auction houses and restaurants and collectors. Wine might be purchased at auction, sight unseen, by a telephone bidder, and then held “in bond” in a storage warehouse for decades before being resold. If it was an intact case, an auction house might never look at what was inside. Montrachet came in a wooden box girdled by a metal band that had to be cut to remove it; retailers often moved cases without ever opening them to inspect their contents. The 1981 and 1982 Pétrus wasn’t detected until it reached Paris and London and the wooden boxes were opened. The boom in buying wine purely for the sake of investment had only exacerbated this phenomenon, which wine people made light of in an oft-recycled story.
“Abe bought a shipment of sardines that had already been traded many times and each time profitably,” went one version. “Unlike previous buyers, Abe took the trouble of procuring a box of his purchase. The sardines were terrible. He telephoned Joe, from whom he had bought them, only to be told, ‘But Abe, those sardines are for trading, not eating.’”
AS CONCERN ABOUT the counterfeiting problem grew, there were fitful indications that a scientific solution might be found. A technique developed in France in the late 1980s, nuclear magnetic resonance, could not identify vintage, but could determine where the source grapes had been grown. An auction house challenged a Champagne consignment using radiocarbon dating. The University of Seville would soon come up with a spectrometry test used to compare trace metals in wine and grape source.
But just about everyone other than the châteaux believed that the responsibility, and the only truly effective response, must lie with the châteaux themselves. The easiest problem to attack, from a château standpoint, was older vintages. As of 1990, leading châteaux had become suspicious of a wave of requests to recork old bottles, and become warier of recorking. Recorking opened a loophole for counterfeiters, both in creating an atmosphere in which nonoriginal corks and labels and unnaturally small ullage were considered acceptable, and in providing a mechanism to launder fake wine into wine with an official seal of approval. Given that châteaux had long reconditioned bottles by using different, less rare vintages to top up, the idea that an old bottle was purely what it purported to be was naïve. The practice of recorking therefore provided counterfeiters with yet another plausible argument for why an old wine might taste different from another bottle of the same vintage. Lafite, whose winemakers, starting in the mid-1980s, had regularly flown around the world to recork customers’ bottles, would end the program by 2005. Yquem’s Lur Saluces, who was a member of the brand-protecting Comité Colbert, banned recorking of all Yquem bottles older than 1940.
Countermeasures with regard to new vintages were slower to arrive, with many châteaux resistant to taking meaningful precautions. A few did adopt new anti-counterfeiting technology. Haut-Brion had been embossing its bottles since 1957. Starting with its 1988 vintage, Château Pétrus became one of the first winemakers to take steps specifically to combat counterfeiting, introducing a label containing a hidden code visible only under ultraviolet light. In 1996, Pétrus also began etching its name in its bottles. Margaux, too, was an early adopter, laser-etching each bottle with a château and vintage code starting with the 1989 vintage, and adding a bottle-specific random number, laser-etched in the neck, with the 1995 vintage. Margaux would also add an embossed M in the bottle’s punt, vintage-specific corks and capsules, and anti-counterfeit labels, as well as weighing each case and encoding the poundage in a bar code stamped on the outside, so that bottle theft could be detected without removing the case’s sealing bands.
“It makes their life difficult,” Margaux’s Paul Pontallier said of would-be counterfeiters. “You could maybe fake a few bottles, but you couldn’t do it at an industrial level.”
In 1996, Lafite began using engraved bottles. Lur Saluces took several steps to make it harder to fake Yquem, contracting with a printer of currency to use special watermarked paper, embedded with a signature pattern of particles visible only under ultraviolet light. He also introduced the use of a particularly adhesive glue, which did not endear him to those collectors who liked to soak labels off bottles and paste them into scrapbooks. The glass bottles, too, were embossed with certain marks. In Burgundy, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti put a new system in place, including using embossed script on the label, changing the color and thickness of the bottle glass, and fixing labels more securely. After Langton’s discovery of the fake Grange, Australia’s Penfolds began laser-etching its bottles.
As an international cash business involving commodities, with little transparency in the distribution chain, rare wine seemed ripe for exploitation by organized money launderers, and the FBI and New Scotland Yard began looking into fine-wine merchants in the United States and the UK regarding possible fake bottles. The investigators spoke of Asia as a major new target of counterfeiters; while parts of the continent, especially Singapore and Hong Kong, were home to serious connoisseurs, many new-money collectors were naïve (Pétrus and Coke being a popular combination). Soon after his “In Vino Veritas?” essay appeared in The Wine Advocate, Robert Parker received a visit from two FBI agents; he spent a day with them, giving a tutorial in the wine business. “They led me to believe it was pretty serious and widespread,” Parker recalled, “and that the Russian Mafia was involved. The question was, ‘How do you prove it?’”
IN 1997, a year after the secret anti-counterfeiting meeting in London, Sotheby’s was presented with a fitting opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to sound provenance. A handful of other Jefferson bottles had surfaced, and Sotheby’s announced that it would sell them. Though they didn’t come from Rodenstock, and had a much diff
erent history, the bottles were a remarkable thing for the auction house to offer. Serena Sutcliffe had very publicly spoken of the rising problem of fake wine, and the three Jefferson bottles sold by Christie’s, though she didn’t say so publicly, were Exhibit A when it came to suspect old vintages.
While the seller remained anonymous—Sotheby’s listed the lot of three Madeiras as “Property of a Nobleman”—the bottles seemed to have a very clear and convincing chain of ownership. Each bore a paper slip label attesting to its origin. All were Madeiras dating back to 1800, and as the auction catalog laid it out, they had been “purchased at sale of effects; President Jefferson; by Honl. Philip Evan Thomas of Maryland 1843.” The labels showed the succession of owners through whom the bottles were then passed down, ending with their purchase by Douglas H. Thomas in 1890. The consignor was Thomas’s great-grandson.
As Madeiras, these bottles stood a greater chance of being drinkable than eighteenth-century Bordeaux, but their conditions varied significantly. One was empty; Sotheby’s estimated it would fetch between $2,500 and $3,500. One was less than half-full, its contents brown and cloudy; this was estimated at $6,000 to $8,000. The bottle in the best condition, with ullage at mid-to-low shoulder, was estimated to fetch between $10,000 and $15,000. Nonetheless, the catalog cautioned warily that all of the bottles were being “sold on the basis of their historical relevance only and purchasers should assume that the wine is not fit for consumption.”
“These bottles, once belonging to President Thomas Jefferson, have miraculously survived being passed through generations and are of extraordinary historical importance,” Sotheby’s enthused. Beyond the slip labels, there were contemporaneous documents to back them up: an 1890 auction catalog mentioning the bottles as part of a sale of the estate of the daughter of Philip Evan Thomas, and an October 11, 1904, Baltimore Sun article recounting a dinner at which Douglas H. Thomas had made a toast with the Madeira. The dinner, which featured “crab flakes, Belvedere, in chafing dish” and “fancy ices,” had wrapped up with the “Jefferson Madeira Vintage, 1800.” The Sun article, from ninety-three years before, laid out the wine’s pedigree exactly as the tattered slip labels did. The provenance seemed solid. Sotheby’s saw no reason to contact Monticello to obtain a second opinion.
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