How To Out-Fool Wine Fraudsters (FOR)

[AKR]

How To Out-Fool Wine Fraudsters (Forbes)
Lana Bortolot

Knowing a few tricks of the trade will keep you from feeling foolish in the wake of a multibillion-dollar fraud industry.

Wine fraud is rampant through the world

On April 1, 1950, Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, ran a story that shocked every wine lover in the country. Vinmonopolet, the government-owned wine monopoly, was is possession of a large shipment of French wine, still in barrels. The problem: they had run out of bottles. The solution? Practically give it away to anyone willing to tote it. An announcement on the newspaper’s front page promoted a tax-free sale offering a 75-percent discount. Buyers were to bring their own “buckets, pitchers and the like” for the ultimate take-away. Thirsty, bargain-hunting Norwegians lined up outside the Vinmonopolets at 10am, the opening time, with buckets. And, well, you can guess the outcome.

We wine drinkers might not be that gullible in these times, but there are plenty of ways in which we can get hoodwinked buying wine—some of which cost way more than the price of a hardware-store bucket and a morning’s lost wages.

Wine fraud represents a $3-billion business in the industry, says Maureen Downey, founder of Winefraud.com, and a global authority on wine counterfeiting. The San Francisco-based wine detective has advised the FBI and the US Department of Justice in a number of high-profile cases. She also played a feature role in the 2016 docu-film, “Sour Grapes,” about Rudy Kurniawan’s $30-million-plus counterfeit operation and the New York auction house, Acker Merrill & Condit, that sold record amounts of his wines at auction.

“There are many ways of conducting wine fraud,” she said, adding it affects people all through the distribution channel—from high-end collectors and ordinary consumers to merchants and second-market sellers such as auction firms. Even producers, especially highly desirable names, bear the burden now having to consider anti-fraud devices such as special seals, embossed bottle designs, RFID or other embedded technology.

It’s an additional liability for producers in a highly aesthetic industry where visual branding is so closely tied to heritage and prestige. Technology such as that offered by TruTag can help disguise fraud-protection devices, making it harder for counterfeiters to detect and copy, while also keeping the packaging’s appeal.

“Fraud is such a diverse, fragmented industry and there’s a huge biodiversity of solutions,” says TruTag CEO Michael Bartholomeusz. His company specializes in covert protection for merchandise (think sneakers), and the food, pharma and now wine industries. In the latter, TruTag technology can be “integrated into the wine bottle label itself in the ink, a varnish or a barcode, so the elegance of the existing label will not be impacted.” Thus “tagged,” the bottles are tracked through the supply chain right down to a consumer-friendly app.”

But the trained, naked eye and some honed intuition can go a long way in spotting fakes.

“Being able to authenticate a bottle of wine, vet a seller, and get a counterfeit bottle proven as [fake] so that the consumer can get their money back all helps keep fraud down,” Downey says. But she warns, “with 3-D printing, higher printing capabilities at home, and information more accessible via the Internet, we are seeing some really remarkable counterfeits.”

Here are some basic tips for being your own detective.

You probably already know your [wine] farmer, but it’s good to know your vendor, too. Establishing a relationship with a reputable shop or auction house and inquiring about their acquisition methods helps you understand the risks involved (and perhaps puts them on notice that you’re a savvy buyer). A reputable shop will have the same apprehensions as a buyer of fine and rare wine that you, as a consumer do, and will carefully vet older bottles. Jamie Wolff, a partner at Manhattan’s Chambers Street Wines, says “I do my due diligence on the person selling the bottle. If they’re coming to me with just a single bottle or two of [Château] Latour, that’s a red flag.”

You don’t need the Master of Wine credential or to have studied Bordeaux’s 1855 Classification, but if you are going to run in that pack, it helps to do a little research—at least create a cheat sheet of questions to either ask the merchant or look up on your own. Things to check: ensure the producer and vintage years match up, check years of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) in France or Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) in Italy. One of the fakes in Downey uses as an example was pawned off as a 1953 classified wine from St.-Emilion. Opps! St.-Emilion wasn’t classified until 1955.

Prestige producers like Bordeaux's Chateau d'Yquem are popular with wine counterfeiters.
"Too consistent" is a red flag. Here, fill levels and the labels are too similar to be credible
If an aged bottle looks too beautiful—either it’s pristine or the lovely patina on the label is too uniform in color or shape, then you might be looking at a fake. Super sleuths use a UV flashlight to detect the luminous “ultrawhite,” a paper component introduced in 1957. If that ’45 Mouton glows in the dark, then you won’t be in the dark! Downey also recommends giving bottles a sniff: Many fraudsters stain labels with wet tea bags, coffee and tobacco. If they did, you might still detect the odor.

Wine fraud detection techniques can be learned on the job or by training.

Know—or at least be able to look up—the most sought-after bottles and vintages and be a suspect rather than a fool. William Edgerton, a fine-wine appraiser in Connecticut, can rattle off the hot bottles as easily as he can recite his ABCs. Of course, he’s been at it 30-some years, but the information is attainable on the Internet or via a number of wine apps for your mobile device. Frank Martell, Heritage Auctions’ senior director of fine and rare wines in Los Angeles, says he’s instantly suspect of certain bottles. “Anything that comes in [for evaluation] that is Henri Jayer, or DRC (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti) with some years on it, from the ‘30s, ‘40 and ‘50s, I inspect carefully.”

As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.” Lincoln, the son of a bourbon distiller, was a teetotaler, but were he a fine-wine buyer, my bet is that he’d be nobody’s fool. And now, neither will you.