{"id":106134,"date":"2016-04-09T08:23:16","date_gmt":"2016-04-09T08:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/04\/09\/wait-whats-wine-forgery-how-would-you-fake\/"},"modified":"2016-04-09T08:23:16","modified_gmt":"2016-04-09T08:23:16","slug":"wait-whats-wine-forgery-how-would-you-fake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/04\/09\/wait-whats-wine-forgery-how-would-you-fake\/","title":{"rendered":"Wait, what’s wine forgery? How would you fake wine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

disintegratedself<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

pyrrhiccomedy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.<\/p>\n

First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million<\/i>\u00a0in 2014.<\/p>\n

And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine\u2019s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?<\/p>\n

Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world<\/a>, I\u2019m gonna say no.<\/p>\n

There are definitely flavors associated with old wines<\/i>, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don\u2019t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like\u00a0Harvey Rodenstock<\/a> and Rudy Korniawan<\/a> do exactly that.<\/p>\n

It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them<\/i>. They\u2019re not for drinking! They\u2019re an investment, or they\u2019re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?<\/p>\n

So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you\u2019re faking, and there\u2019s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They\u2019re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.<\/p>\n

Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby\u2019s auction house\u2019s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The question isn\u2019t how do you fake wine: it\u2019s how the fraudsters ever get caught<\/i>. In Rodenstock and Korniawan\u2019s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down).\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a great podcast on this topic<\/a> in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sources:\u00a01<\/a>\u00a02<\/a>\u00a03<\/a>\u00a04<\/a>\u00a05<\/a>\u00a06<\/a>\u00a07<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is how I will scam the bourgeoisie out of 1.4 million dollars.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

disintegratedself: pyrrhiccomedy: VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP. First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot … <\/p>\n

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