Convicted wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan is safely behind bars, but many of his fakes are still floating around in cellars—along with plenty of other suspect bottles.
Just in time, wine consultant Maureen Downey, who helped the FBI bring Kurniawan down, is launching a website in early April to teach fine wine lovers how to spot what’s real and what’s not.
“Winefraud.com will be a resource for everyone wanting to do due-diligence on rare wines,” she said. “There’s been nowhere to learn about this stuff before.” The site will provide tutorials on how to spot fraud and a gallery of photographs of the real things to compare against a suspect bottle or label.
How big is the fake wine problem? No one really knows. Downey estimates the value of the counterfeits Kurniawan dumped on the market between 2002 and his arrest in 2012 to be roughly $130 million when he first sold them. Add to that hundreds of bottles popping up from the half a dozen other fraudsters convicted in the past couple of years ? and new players who haven’t yet been caught. The number could easily add up several hundred million dollars.
Downey, who got her start as a wine authenticator at three auction houses, founded her own wine collector management firm, San Francisco-based Chai Consulting, in 2005. Over the past decade, she’s built an extensive database of photos and information about fake bottles and a gallery of authentic ones for comparison, including every vintage of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. All of this fills 49,943 computer files.
The files also contain photographs of the bottles, labels, and `to do’ lists from the 20 boxes of evidence that the FBI had found in Kurniawan’s home and on his computers. “I noticed a lot of things Rudy got wrong with some wines, like the word chateau misspelled on a cork,” Downey says. “That’s a marker to watch for.”
The most useful section on the website will be Wine Authentication 101, a virtual tutorial in specific counterfeit practices, with information from print and paper experts. “There will be enough for collectors to see that a particular bottle might be problematic, but not enough to train counterfeiters,” she said.
Fees will be “in the hundreds of dollars,” according to Downey, but a whole lot cheaper than hiring an expert to vet all your bottles. The collector level includes a professional review of two bottles per year by Downey or another respected authentication expert, Michael Egan, and a discount for additional consulting.
Bloomberg News edited by ESM
