The wine world's tangled web
Wine fraud is difficult to detect and, with the boom in super-rich buyers willing to pay five-figure sums for the most sought-after vintages, the temptation to doctor bottles can be almost overwhelming. As the FBI investigates the fake wine trade, Jancis Robinson looks at a complex and murky business
JANCIS ROBINSON. Financial Times. London (UK): Mar 17, 2007. pg. 1
Liquid and unpredictable, wine is easy to doctor, even to a standard capable of convincing experts. Indeed, wines have been adulterated and counterfeited since at least the first century AD when Pliny the Elder complained that "not even our nobility ever enjoys wines that are genuine".
The big difference today is the prices achieved by bottles now sold as "fine and rare", to adopt saleroom parlance. Fuelled by an international explosion of interest in wine among the swelling ranks of the super-rich, wine prices have soared since the 1980s. Some bottles of blue-chip wines - such as burgundies from the Domaine de la Romanee Conti or the late master winemaker Henri Jayer or from one of the smaller estates such as Chateaux Petrus or Lafleur - have been known to command five-figure sums if the vintage is sufficiently sought after.
It may also be many years after purchase that a collector decides to open that bottle of Chateau Latour-a-Pomerol 1961 or Roumier, Bonnes Mares 1923, only to find that the liquid inside bears little relation to the elixir promised by the label and suggested by the price. Nor can the buyer inspect the cork for the correct markings before pulling it. Collectors have tales of taking dubious bottles back to the chateau or domaine for authentication but even the producer may need to taste the wine before venturing an opinion, and then it may, after all, be only an opinion. There is as yet no foolproof analytical technique for verifying precise vintage and geographical provenance.
A detailed inspection of labels can help as fonts, colours and type sizes have tended to evolve. However, many wines of doubtful provenance come from an era that predates the current regime in charge of a wine estate, who have generally only recently realised the importance of rigorous cellar records. Meanwhile the counterfeiters of old labels have become increasingly skilled.
With bottles, the quality of the glass, colour, weight and shape can offer a few clues. Empty bottles of particularly old and expensive bottles of wine (and spirits) can command healthy sums in certain markets, notably Hong Kong. Knowledgeable wine collectors and producers insist on seeing the destruction of the empties after some particularly serious wine tastings nowadays.
Fake bottles may have been in circulation for years but it is only relatively recently that their incidence - and value - has become too great to ignore. And, by the law of averages, it is likely that almost any auctioneer or fine wine trader has, however unwittingly, sold at least some fake wine. This has acted as an unhealthy brake on any concerted campaign to tackle the problem. Serena Sutcliffe, head of Sotheby's wine department since 1991, has been one of the few to go willingly on the record on this issue - last year warning that the quantity of 1945 vintage wines sold was greater than the actual output of wine in that year.
Another is Maureen Downey, a California-based fine wine consultant who now runs her own fine wine business, Chai Consulting. She feels strongly that the fine wine trade has fallen short of its responsibilities. "Jewellery is rarely auctioned without receipts from the seller," she points out. "Why should fine and rare wine be any different? I think it is fair that buyers ask what has been done to verify or, at minimum, question the provenance of collections offered with equal diligence. Did the retailers, brokers or auction houses ask for receipts or proof of sales? Where did the consignor get hold of many of the gems they offer and how much did they spend? Sometimes, consignments are just so opulent that they beg to be questioned. I always look at all these variables when considering a purchase for myself or my clients."
Her concern is that auctioneers, most of whom charge both buyers and vendors commissions of between 10 and 19.5 per cent, and traders with their generous mark-ups, are short-changing their customers. "There are a few bad eggs - but not at the specialist level. Most specialists do their due diligence and are above board. The major problem is training or lack thereof. As always, experience is invaluable. It is too easy to hide behind poorly trained assessors or wine inspectors. They all make fair margins so they owe it to their customers to make sure that they properly train the people who inspect wines."
That training, however, is becoming ever more complex. Increasing numbers of fine wine producers have been developing new ways of protecting the authenticity of their products. Chateau Petrus has label markings, for example, that can only be read under ultra- violet light.
Petrus, which makes just 2,500 cases of wine in a good year, has long been a prime target of the counterfeiters. Though Christian Moueix, current director of the property, has grave doubts that larger bottle sizes were even used before 1945, large formats of it lie in pride of place in cellars all over the world. "All I can say for certain is that these imperiales (the jumbo, six-litre size) of 1921 are highly improbable - they would have made no sense at that time."
As Maureen Downey says: "Why are more buyers not asking from where these 'amazing best cellar of all times!' are coming? Anyone think to investigate and determine exactly how they had amassed such collections? Was it a lifetime pursuit or a quick investment? Ultimately, in my experience, it's usually about fragile egos and greed."
Last year, one particular American wine collector with extremely deep pockets and an ego that can be assumed to be fairly robust decided to wade in and pursue those who sold him wines he now believes to be fake. It is this pursuit that has triggered the recently reported investigations into the fine wine trade by the US Department of Justice and the FBI.
The billionaire William I. Koch, who is suing the German wine merchant Hardy Rodenstock for putting allegedly counterfeit bottles into circulation, is no stranger to litigation, having spent years locked in dispute with his brothers over the family oil company. Among his many other achievements he has financed, and helped crew, the winning America's Cup boat in 1992 and is a lifelong collector of boats, art and wine. It was a request from the Boston Museum of Fine Art for documentation supporting the provenance of a "Jefferson bottle" that was to be included in a display of the billionaire's collection at the musuem that alerted Koch to the possibility that some of his wine might be counterfeit. (Thomas Jefferson, the connoisseur president, kept detailed records of his purchases.) David Molyneux-Berry, a former head of Sotheby's wine department, was called in to sniff out possible fakes in two of Koch's cellars (a third warehouse crammed with painstakingly barcoded bottles is being prepared for inspection).
"Bill is not going to settle," says Molyneux-Berry, "not like some people who have been defrauded and don't want to look like idiots so they've taken compensation and handed back the bottles, bottles which the fraudsters simply put back on the market."
Koch's four Jefferson bottles, red and sweet white bordeaux supposedly from the 1784 and 1787 vintages bought by Jefferson, were supplied by Hardy Rodenstock. When I spoke to Rodenstock earlier this week, he maintains the Jefferson bottles are genuine, saying that in the mid-1980s he had been offered "about 30" bottles engraved 'Th. J.' from a bricked-up cellar in Paris by a vendor whose name, Rodenstock wearily says, he has forgotten.
The discovery of the Jefferson bottles caused, unsurprisingly, quite a stir in fine wine circles. In 1985, after subjecting a half- bottle to various tests, Christie's auctioned a bottle of the Lafite 1787 for Pounds 105,000 (still the highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine) - although, unfortunately, it turned to vinegar after being displayed in the Forbes Museum upright under strong lights, which dried out the cork and fatally let air in. Two years later, the same auction house sold another bottle from the collection, this time a half-bottle of the Margaux 1784, to Marvin Shanken, publisher of the American magazine Wine Spectator.
Rodenstock, now 65, appeared on the fine wine scene in the 1980s and
1990s as a pop music entrepreneur who established a connection with one of Germany's wine magazines and had built up an enviable cellar, investing heavily in the then unfashionable but incomparable sweet white bordeaux Chateau d'Yquem. He hosted a number of extraordinary wine events, three of which I attended.In June 1985, six months before Christie's offered the Lafite, I witnessed what we were told was the opening of the first red wine from the "Jefferson collection" at first growth Chateau Mouton- Rothschild in Bordeaux. A taste of a 1787 Branne Mouton, as the estate was then known, was ferried up to an ailing but delighted Baron Philippe de Rothschild in his bedroom above the tasting room by his grandson. The Baron's cellarmaster, Raoul Blondin, had been expecting vinegar and became extremely excited by the unexpectedly toothsome reality. Michael Broadbent, of Christie's, had predicted something "a bit acidic, a bit decayed". But, in fact, once the treacle-brown liquid was shared between us, Rodenstock and a group of German wine lovers, the bouquet actually grew in the glass. The wine tasted as though port could have been added to it, so vigorous and rich was it. It was, undoubtedly, a delicious drink.
The following September, Broadbent and I also constituted the British contingent at an exceptional 12-course, 66-wine feast at Chateau d'Yquem in Sauternes where the piece de resistance was an engraved flask dated at mid-19th century of a (rather tired) precursor of Yquem. (Rodenstock now says he has no memory of this wine, though he can remember that South America was the source.)Comte Alexandre de Lur- Saluces, who then owned the Yquem estate, told me Rodenstock owned far more vintages of Yquem than he did.
More than 100 of these were to emerge at the third and last Rodenstock event I witnessed, the culmination of a week-long series of tastings in Munich in 1998 devoted to Yquem, dating all the way back to those two Jefferson vintages (rather rank-tasting, I seem to remember). Fellow guests at the feast included France's leading wine writer Michel Bettane; the Austrian glassmaker Georg Riedel; Italy's most famous wine producer Angelo Gaja; and the German footballer Franz Beckenbauer.
By then, Molyneux-Berry's doubts about Koch's Jefferson bottles had become more widely shared. But when I raised the question of attribution in an article in the FT's How To Spend It magazine, Rodenstock fired off copies of pages from auction catalogues explaining various provenances.
I have always found Rodenstock enigmatic. Could managing what Rodenstock now describes as "a few German pop singers" really have generated enough cash to buy all these bottles so generously opened? Then there was a strange episode when, for reasons I forget, we shared a ride in Bordeaux and he showed me with great pride, but for no obvious reason, a walnut he had stuffed with a condom. A telling display of dexterity and ingenuity perhaps?
It is thanks to Hardy Rodenstock, however, that I have had some of the most extraordinary tasting experiences of my life. I have no idea whether the bottle of Yquem 1811, the famous year of the comet, served in Munich was genuine, but I can assure you it was one of the most delicious liquids I have ever tasted, even if strangely raspberry- flavoured. Anyone who could create that has my respect, whoever they were.
Rodenstock, who commutes between Munich, Kitzbuhel and Marbella, has been sued before in the early 1990s in a now settled dispute with the German collector Hans-Peter Frericks. There was a high- profile Munich court case in which Frericks claimed his former friend Rodenstock had sold him fake Jefferson bottles. Rodenstock maintains they were faked after the sale and denies all the allegations. Though a Munich state court found in favour of Frericks in 1992, Rodenstock appealed, and the two filed complaints against each other for defamation. Charges were dropped and, in 1995, the case was settled out of court.
In 1989, before the German lawsuit, Molyneux-Berry inspected Frericks' cellar and found some literally incredible combinations of vintage and format. "I turned down the Frericks cellar in Germany because, although he had some great wines, there were just too many fakes," he recalls.
"It does seem to be more of an American problem because the collecting mentality is different - collectors like to have every stamp in the book, so to speak. People in Britain who have similar wine collections are rarely British. They are the sort of super- rich people who find it amusing to have a fantastic cellar but are only just finding out that they have been tricked . . . Some of them have stepped forward but only the Americans have done something about it. Bill Koch is a hero because he's prepared to stand on the parapet."
The public, of course, like nothing more than to see experts of any sort conned. And it does seem, to judge from the apparently unstoppable flow of great old wines on to the market and the soaring prices paid for them, that there are legions of willing buyers new to wine and anxious to build up a cellar. This is surely the ideal time for a really thorough spring clean of the fine wine market.
Jancis Robinson's tasting notes on the Munich Yquems are on purple pages of