The red French wines were some of the most high-end bottles you could find, stacked neatly among other luxury labels. They appeared in 2019 on the top shelves of wine merchants in Italy and Switzerland, catering to wealthy customers and their finer palates.
The price tag? 15,000 euros.
The bottles weren’t worth a fraction of that. In fact, the wine wasn’t even French.
So goes the latest caper in the increasingly robust wine fraud market, where both small-time hustlers and organized crime members try to dupe the finer tastes — and fatter wallets — of wine aficionados around the world.
Europol, the inter-European police force, announced on Wednesday that it had dismantled a wide-ranging scheme that manufactured wine in Italy, mislabeled the wine as French, then clandestinely shipped the supposed Grand Cru vintages to unsuspecting wine merchants around the world. Six people, who were not identified by Europol, were arrested.
While the Everyman may be more concerned about identity fraud or personal finance scams, wine fraud targets a more select demographic, whose victims are far more likely to find hubris at the standard dining table than sympathy. Still, such heists have gained traction over the last two decades, as rare wine prices have exploded.
“We are seeing a lot more collector fraud today than we have ever seen,” said Rebecca Gibb, a Wine Master and author of “Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud.” The trend, she said, began in the 2000s, amid a bull market for fine wines, when “lots of people who knew nothing about wine started to see this as a potential addition to their portfolio.”
The boogeyman of contemporary wine fraud is Rudy Kurniawan, a charismatic, savvy businessman who arrived on the Los Angeles scene in 2004, buying and selling tens of millions of dollars’ worth of rare vintages. He was eventually convicted of fraud, sentenced to ten years in prison, and later deported to his native Indonesia. (Mr. Kurniawan’s self-defeating stumble was not one of taste, but aesthetics: He began using fraudulent labels that predated the vineyards they purported to be from.)
A smattering of similar cases bookend that one: Thousands of bottles of fake Tuscan wine in Italy; fake French bottles supposedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson; fraudulent bottles of Bordeaux uncovered in a Chinese warehouse.
The takedown of the recent operation involved a smattering of law enforcement agencies in some of the world’s richest, cloistered enclaves. Among them were police forces in France, Milan and Geneva, a city that has long catered to the tastes — and tax needs — of the affluent.
Investigators from those jurisdictions said they interrupted a sophisticated criminal network that first began producing fraudulent bottles more than a decade ago. The fake bottles were detected when eagle-eyed investigators discovered a latent trace on the back of a forged wine label in 2014 that led them to an individual who had been involved in another, similar case.
That initial probe led to the arrest of a Russian national and two Italian winemakers, who were busted for faking Grand Cru wine domains — a designation for high-end vintages — and mislabeling their Italian wares as French.
The case, though, was far from solved. The fake bottles began resurfacing in 2019, mostly in Italy and Switzerland, where the fraudulent wines were sold alongside real ones, and were distributed by another offshoot of the original fraud ring from 2014.
In searches across Italy, the authorities seized counterfeited bottles disguised as a variety of Grand Cru wines, forged stickers and wax products, machinery to fill and recap bottles, and more than 100,000 euros in cash.
Since the coronavirus pandemic elevated the online wine market, industry professionals expect the practice to carry on — and to become everyone’s problem. It’s not just high-end buyers who are now further from the vine; fake bottles of mid-shelf wines like Jacob’s Creek have started surfacing, too.
“There’s always going to be somebody that’s going to have the audacity to have a go,” Ms. Gibb said. “The wine industry has to keep up with the fraudsters.”
But, she noted, wine fraud is likely to remain a problem for a select few.
“The people who are committing these crimes, and the people who are the victims of these crimes are generally middle-to-upper-class white males,” Ms. Gibb said. “I think people struggle to be sympathetic to the victims of fraud who have got this sort of money to drop on a bottle of wine.”
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