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Inside a climate-controlled storage facility somewhere in southern England, dizzying quantities of fine wine lie behind thick doors armed with biometric locks. Some of the bottles here are worth £25,000 each - or about £400 for a modest sip. I cradle with as much care as I would a newborn baby an exceptionally good Bordeaux. The date is early Sixties, the label is ornate and the wine's origins in the exclusive Pomerol commune makes it one of the world's most sought-after grand-cru vintages.

'You won't find any of this on the market in Europe at the moment,' says my guide, who has agreed to talk on the strict condition that neither his nor the bottle's identity - nor even our location - are revealed. 'It's one of the rarest and most highly rated wines of the last century.' Were it to become available today, it would fetch tens of thousands of pounds. Yet it will never be sold.


'Look a little closer at the label here,' the wine man says, pointing his little finger at the bottom-left corner. A good three times smaller than the letters you are reading now, the words 'Imprimé en France' reveal where the paper was printed more than 50 years ago. 'Does anything look strange to you?' A second glance reveals that the 'I' of 'Imprimé ' is missing. Perhaps it got rubbed off, although the paper shows no signs of wear. Inexplicably, the word also includes a glaring typo. The label reads: 'mpriné en France'. While the bottle otherwise looks every bit the part, a schoolboy error reveals it as a fake - the work of a skilled if occasionally careless counterfeiter who now resides in a similarly secure facility with the word 'prison' on the front.

The market for fine wines has increased by more than 23.4 per cent in the past decade, and the British wine market alone is expected to grow in value by more than £13bn by 2018. And hand in hand with this incredible growth - and the incredible sums involved - is a huge increase in wine fraud, a crime seemingly short on consequence (unless you've just sunk £100,000 on a case of Château Le Faux Cher), but long on high-stakes drama. As markets and palates have inflated prices of the rarest and finest Bordeaux and Burgundies, counterfeiters have created cults of personality about themselves as covers for plots to fool a world of expansive wallets and expensive reputations.

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'And we're really looking at the tip of the iceberg,' says Maureen Downey, an American consultant and self-styled wine detective. Downey alone could inspire a Hollywood script. Equal parts Hercule Poirot and Erin Brockovich, she fearlessly pursues fakes and fraudsters from her base in San Francisco. 'For every story that you hear about, there are 10 stories behind it - because these people do a very good job of covering their asses. We're seeing more sources of counterfeit wine, but only one guy is in prison. One guy!'

That guy is Rudy Kurniawan. He and Hardy Rodenstock, a fellow alleged counterfeiter with a crazy backstory and fake name (the men's real names are, respectively, Zhen Wang Huang and Meinhard Görke), burst into the most rarefied level of the trade before eventually suffocating under suspicion and litigation. Downey estimates that the wine still in circulation made by Kurniawan alone has a street value of £380m. 'We're talking about tens of thousands of bottles,' she adds. 'He was doing it for 10 years.'


Kurniawan was a high-rolling, Ferrari-driving Los Angeles collector who epitomised an emerging scene of brash American oenophiles. In the mid-to-late 2000s, he hosted bacchanalian dinners, once blowing $250,000 (then £120,000) on wine and always asking for the empties to be returned to him. He earned the nickname 'Dr Conti' for his fondness for Romanée-Conti, the tiny and prestigious domaine in Burgundy. At two auctions in 2006, he sold rare wines for more than $35m (then £20m).

But Kurniawan's wines included vintages that had never been bottled. Other discrepancies and flaws emerged. Eventually Bill Koch, a billionaire American collector and member of a family of industrialists, sued him. Wronged producers piled on, and in 2012 the FBI raided Kurniawan's home. They found scores of old bottles, corking equipment, stacks of forged labels and the real wines he would blend to make fakes. Home for Kurniawan until 2021 at least is a jail 100 miles north of LA, where I sent him a friendly letter (sample question: 'how's prison?'). At the time of writing, he has not replied.

Water, milk, ashes and even lead have been openly added to wine through the ages to make it more drinkable. But misleading practices date back centuries too. More than 2,000 years ago, Pliny the Elder noted that 'not even our nobility ever enjoys wines that are genuine'. In 1709, the English essayist Joseph Addison wrote in Tatler of the 'fraternity of chymical operators..., who squeeze Bourdeaux out of a sloe and draw Champagne from an apple'.

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Spirits containing poisonous methanol have killed hundreds in Turkey and India in the past year. But when fraudsters mess with fine wine, they tend to pour blends of decent, comparable plonk into old bottles, often over the original sediment, the appearance of which is hard to fake. 'Kurniawan's recipe for a 1945 Mouton is a combination of old and young Château Palmer and Californian cabernet,' says Downey, who last year launched Winefraud.com as an industry resource. Labels can be scanned, edited and slapped onto refilled bottles. They are then typically sold to unsuspecting or complicit middlemen or auction houses.


Even when wine is sold to be drunk, rather than to collect dust and zeros, getting the taste right can be the lowest priority, particularly when so few people have encountered the rarest vintages. As a result, counterfeiters have been able not only to get away with it, but also to prime tongues for further fakes. 'It's likely that the major tasting notes that we have on many of the oldest and rarest wines are based on counterfeits,' Downey says. 'We don't know what the real wine tastes like.' She also points out that many of those notes, which are used for commercial purposes, were made under the influence (swallowing was and is mandatory at some tastings, and the best stuff is served last. 'You don't spit away history,' Hardy Rodenstock was known to say).

Downey is a rare loud voice in fine wine. The man in the storage facility was one of many who preferred not to be named in this story. Many others declined to speak at all. There is a palpable fear of litigation, loss of reputation and alarmism among would-be buyers. 'We don't want our customers to think everything is fake,' one merchant says. And he's right - not everyone with expensively stocked cellars need panic. But Downey says that the lessons of the Kurniawan scandal have not been learned, and that unknowable quantities of fake wine - not all of it his - slosh around the market. 'Counterfeit wine has itself become a cottage industry,' she explains. 'Vendors are agreeing to compensate for bad purchases, but only if they get the wine back with a non-disclosure agreement. They then resell the wine, after the prices have risen dramatically, and profit twice on counterfeits.' Meanwhile, she adds, while Kurniawan is locked up, 'nobody who profited from his crimes has been held accountable'.

Downey says this explicit trade in fakes typically goes on outside the secure supply chains between producers and the established auction houses and merchants. But longer chains are vulnerable and, across the industry, blind eyes are turned and suspicious cases quietly sent back. 'I know that, legally, silence is not consent,' she adds. 'But morally and ethically, it is. We have an industry where shady people thrive because nobody speaks out.'

As well as silence and subjectivity, Hardy Rodenstock's tale reveals the power of charm and chutzpah in a trade that is vulnerable - not least after a few drinks - to stories that seem too good not to be true. In 1985, the debonair German said he discovered, in a forgotten Parisian cellar, a cache of 200-year- old bottles from the top chateaux - Lafite, Yquem, Mouton. This would have been exciting enough, but each bottle was also etched with the initials of Thomas Jefferson, the American Founding Father, who fell in love with wine when he lived in France in the 1780s. Malcolm Forbes, the late billionaire publisher, bought a 1787 Lafite at auction for £105,000 (triple that to get today's money), a record for a single bottle, and Koch bought four more for half a million dollars. Rodenstock became a star and went on to unearth more exceptional wine. At a dinner in 1998, guests sunk two Jeffersons among Yquem vintages spanning 125 years. 'Amazingly, they didn't taste over the hill or oxidised,' one journalist noted. 'The 1784 tasted as if it were decades younger.'

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By 2005, serious doubts about Rodenstock had surfaced. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation said they did not believe the bottles ever belonged to the former US president. Koch employed a retired FBI agent to investigate further. Years of legal wrangling followed, but the German successfully argued that he remained outside the jurisdiction of the US courts. He has always strongly denied faking anything, but today keeps an uncharacteristically low profile.

Koch, who is 76, has spent many more millions pursuing fraudsters than he ever lost on fake wine. He declined to talk to Tatler, but has previously discussed twin motives for his mission. The first is the pleasure he finds in suing bad guys (he can afford it - Forbes puts his wealth at £1.3bn), but he also decries the 'code of silence' in the industry and among collectors. 'I'm the only guy who's blowing the whistle on it,' he said in 2013.Michael Egan, who is from England but now based in Bordeaux, is another wine consultant turned detective who is unafraid to speak out. He was an expert witness in the Kurniawan trial and has estimated that £70m of fakes change hands each year. He also warns of a coming flood from China, where the luxury-goods boom has added lift to soaring prices for top wines, making them appealing to Chinese as well as European counterfeiters. 'At some stage, I'm guessing people in China will realise they've been sold a pup and that stock will start making its way onto the market here,' he says from his home in Bordeaux.

At Hedonism Wines - the startling Mayfair store opened in 2012 by Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a Russian telecoms tycoon - Alistair Viner, the wine buyer, is refreshingly honest when asked if he can guarantee the authenticity of every bottle on the racks. 'No, absolutely not,' he says, while the hum of the air-conditioning competes with Edith Piaf. 'Counterfeiting is so unbelievably good that I couldn't possibly say that.'

Yet, where parts of the industry are inclined to act, the response to counterfeiting is strong. At Hedonism, where an 1811 Yquem can be yours for £98,700, Viner carefully inspects new stock when not buying directly from respected auction houses. He backs away at the slightest hint of a problem with private buyers. Will Hargrove, head of fine wine at Corney & Barrow, the exclusive UK agent for Romanée-Conti, says the merchant now defaces bottles after tastings to reduce the risk of refilling. 'We pretty much don't touch anything prior to 1982, unless it's always been with us,' he adds.

At Berry Bros & Rudd, fine-wine buyer Philip Moulin has just taken on a new job title - quality and authentication manager. He leads a small, specially trained team in checking each new bottle under 60-times magnification for signs of fraud. He accepts that as a whole the industry has its head in the sand. 'We need to be more transparent, otherwise it will come back and bite us all on the bottom,' he says.

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Technology is helping to identify fakes (where typos don't give the game away). At the University of Bordeaux, Professor Philippe Hubert passes gamma rays through bottles to determine if levels of radioactive caesium isotopes date the wine to before or since the start of nuclear-weapons testing. 'Usually, we measure around two or three bottles per month at the request of the grand chateaux,' the physicist says. 'One in three is fake.' Producers, meanwhile, are variously using radio-frequency tags, holograms and invisible markers in their attempts to secure the grands crus of the future.

A reluctance to report fakes makes prosecution vanishingly rare, and authorities prioritise the industrial (and dangerous) counterfeiting of cheaper alcohol. 'There's a guy in France who we know has been making large-format 1945 Romanée-Conti for decades,' Downey says. 'But law enforcement isn't doing anything.' An exception was a big bust in 2013 of an international Romanée-Conti counterfeiting ring based in Italy. But that case has yet to come to court.

Much of the industry is inclined to play down the scale of the problem, but Downey and Egan are tireless in fighting the war on fakes. Downey remembers how her suspicions about Rodenstock in the early 2000s, when she worked for auction houses in New York, 'pissed me off, because I was working 14-hour days, only for these guys to destroy an upstanding industry I have always been proud to work in'. Her work has angered many. 'If you stick your neck out, you're going to get whacked,' she adds. 'Well - guess what? I'm the one who sleeps well at night.'

How to spot a fake

By Michael Egan

Start by checking the capsule covering the top of the bottle to see if it's loose enough to be prised off, which could indicate that it has been taken off already. Also, if you have a magnifying glass or jeweller's loupe of strong magnification, inspect the label.

If the print pixellates or there are flecks of colour in a white label, it may be a photocopy. Hold the bottle against a strong light to check the sediment. If there is a lack of it in older bottles (10 years or more), of Bordeaux and Rhône in particular, this would be an anomaly.

Otherwise, ask a professional in the fine-wine trade to have a look, or indeed get in touch with me. And only consider buying newer wine from established merchants or auction houses who work directly with producers.


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