{"id":27271,"date":"2014-08-09T00:02:01","date_gmt":"2014-08-09T05:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27271"},"modified":"2014-08-08T15:28:50","modified_gmt":"2014-08-08T20:28:50","slug":"faking-fine-old-wines-for-fun-and-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/09\/faking-fine-old-wines-for-fun-and-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"Faking fine old wines for fun and profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I posted an item about a wine collector who got into the business of “creating”<\/a> expensive old wines. BBC News<\/em><\/a> talks about how this worked and how he was caught:<\/p>\n

Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years in jail for committing wine fraud. But just how easy is it to fake a fancy bottle of Burgundy?<\/p>\n

Wine fraud was a problem in classical Rome and it continues to be one now. Some estimate that over 5% of wine consigned and sold at auction is fake.<\/p>\n

But even though it is a very big problem, it is a very difficult thing to do.<\/p>\n

“There is a distinctive taste in aged wine,” says wine chemist Andrew Waterhouse, of the University of California, Davis.<\/p>\n

That taste?<\/p>\n

“Canned asparagus,” he says.<\/p>\n

Old wines — mostly those from the Burgundy and Bordeaux regions of France — have lost the majority of their tannins, giving them a softer taste reminiscent of the spring vegetable.<\/p>\n

Bu taste is only one part of the equation. “It is the experience of drinking something that’s quite rare that’s appealing,” explains Prof Waterhouse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few key ingredients to the fraud: corks, capsules, and soaked-off labels from the authentic wines, plus good but not expensive wine to use either to rejuvenate the older wine or to pass off as the real thing to a less-discriminating buyer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And that’s exactly what Mr Kurniawan was doing in his kitchen in Arcadia, California — essentially creating a “better” vintage by mixing old, good-but-not-great wines with some newer, vibrant pinot noirs.<\/p>\n

Give it a shake, put it in an old bottle, smack on a vintage label — say, one from 1985 instead of 1982 — and voila.<\/p>\n

“He could take a $200 bottle and turn it into over a $1,000 bottle,” says Mr Troy.<\/p>\n

Unless you are used regularly drinking fine vintages — which at thousands of dollars a bottle, is not that many people — the taste would not raise alarm bells.<\/p>\n

“By blending the fruitiness of a new wine with the aged character of the old wine he would approximate in some manner a very, very good aged Burgundy,” explains Prof Waterhouse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I posted an item about a wine collector who got into the business of “creating” expensive old wines. BBC News talks about how this worked and how he was caught: Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced to 10 years in jail for committing wine fraud. But just how easy is it to […]<\/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":[131],"tags":[343,194],"class_list":["post-27271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wine","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-fraud"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-75R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271","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=27271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27272,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271\/revisions\/27272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}