From The Guardian, Sep 10 , 2016:
Rudy Kurniawan amassed a vast fortune trading in rare wines. Trouble is, he was bottling them himself. Ed Cumming reports on a vintage swindle
The world’s biggest wine forger started small. It was the early 2000s, and a young man who went by the name of Rudy Kurniawan began to make a name for himself on the Los Angeles scene. He had swept-back hair and a hearty laugh. More importantly, he had pockets of seemingly infinite depth, so his new friends overlooked his mysterious origins. It was said he came from a wealthy Sino-Indonesian family, living large off handouts. But nobody pressed too hard as long as the dinners – and booze – kept flowing.
Kurniawan also had a palate of rare finesse, better than most at identifying the characteristics of different vintages. Or at least, that’s what the people he fooled said. At first he was interested in Californian wines, in particular pinot noir, but soon developed a taste for Burgundy, made mainly from the same grape but far more glamorous. In Burgundy’s Byzantine system of appellations, Kurniawan sensed hard profits. He became a major player at auctions, buying – and selling –some of the 20th century’s greatest wines. He bought so much Domaine de la Romanée-Conti he became known as “Dr Conti”, which presumably later amused some of those he defrauded.
In one auction at Acker Merrall & Condit in 2006, Kurniawan sold $24.7m of wine, beating the previous record by $10m. These were the days of the first dotcom boom, when Silicon Valley had more money than sense, a combination which has always been drawn to fine wines.
In time, however, discrepancies appeared in the market. Bottles of Clos St Denis from Domaine Ponsot, of vintages between 1945 and 1971, started to turn up. Laurent Ponsot, the head of the house, found this surprising as his family only started making the wine in 1982. He set out to investigate.
Around the same time Bill Koch, an American billionaire who found fake bottles in his collection, hired private detectives and filed a lawsuit. Authentication experts saw more and more dodgy consignments emerging from these record-breaking auctions. At last the FBI got involved. In March 2012 they raided Kurniawan’s house in Arcadia, California. They found a fully equipped counterfeiting workshop, complete with corking tools, labels, empty bottles and extensive tasting notes. Kurniawan had been taking cheaper wines – though still better than you will find in your average off-licence – and putting them in more expensive bottles, or altering bottles to appear more valuable....
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Previously on Rudy Kurniawan:
Big Money: "The man who sold millions in counterfeit wine to rich collectors"
