{"id":15056,"date":"2012-05-14T10:41:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T15:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15056"},"modified":"2012-05-14T10:41:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T15:41:10","slug":"the-shady-back-alleys-of-the-wine-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/05\/14\/the-shady-back-alleys-of-the-wine-trade\/","title":{"rendered":"The shady back alleys of the wine trade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Wallace (who wrote the fascinating book The Billionaire’s Vinegar<\/em>, mentioned here<\/a> in connection with a lawsuit), has a lengthy article in New York<\/em> magazine<\/a> about shady practices in the rare wine business, and the even shadier practitioners:<\/p>\n

Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan\u2019s quirks and r\u00e9sum\u00e9 gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having \u201cpoured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening\u201d and told him that \u201cthe scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.\u201d Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan\u2019s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan\u2019s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. \u201cI thought at the time, \u2018Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,\u2019\u2009\u201d Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world\u2019s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan \u201ca very sweet and generous man.\u201d<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

In October 2004, Kurniawan posted on Parker\u2019s website under the header \u201cLast weekend where I tried to kill John Kapon with legendary wines!!\u201d He wrote about an extravagant four-day run in New York in which he and a group of wine lovers had gorged on priceless Bordeaux and Burgundy. Kurniawan had brought with him what seemed an inexhaustible supply of hyperrarities from a \u201cmagic cellar\u201d — including two cases of the extremely rare 1945 Roman\u00e9e-Conti\u2014which he said he\u2019d bought from a collector in Asia for $2 million. Every night, the group would drink from Kurniawan\u2019s stash and then end up at Cru, the Greenwich Village restaurant with a 150,000-bottle wine list, which stayed open as late as 3 a.m. as Kurniawan ordered one expensive bottle after another off the list.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For instance, Kurniawan didn\u2019t mention the five FedEx packages he received from Cru that year, containing the empty bottles from his wild nights at the restaurant. It wasn\u2019t unusual for a customer to take away a memorable bottle after it was spent. But over the course of Cru\u2019s six-year run until it closed in 2010, no other customer ordered as many bottles and then systematically claimed the empties. Kurniawan was building a bottle museum in his garage, he explained to the sommelier.<\/p>\n

Though Kurniawan presented himself publicly as a mere wine lover, a buyer and not a seller, by the time he made his splash on the wine boards, he was already consigning at auction. And problems had cropped up. As early as 2003, Internet entrepreneur Eric Greenberg was threatening to sue online auction site Winebid over some \u201csuspect\/bad mags,\u201d e-mailing, \u201cMy goal is to bury the consignor\u2019s reputation in the wine world.\u201d Soon after, he reported that he had spoken to the consignor, Rudy Kurniawan, and was convinced that he, too, had been duped by whoever sold him the wine. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Bob Tarantino<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Wallace (who wrote the fascinating book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, mentioned here in connection with a lawsuit), has a lengthy article in New York magazine about shady practices in the rare wine business, and the even shadier practitioners: Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan\u2019s quirks and r\u00e9sum\u00e9 gaps were of much less interest than his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13,131],"tags":[194],"class_list":["post-15056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-usa","category-wine","tag-fraud"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3UQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15056"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15059,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15056\/revisions\/15059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}