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Wine industry fights back against counterfeiters
(Wine - Legal)
NEW YORK: Daniel Posner, owner of a wine shop
specializing in fine and rare vintages, was one of three brokers who
visited a private cellar that was being sold off.
"I backed off," said Posner, who owns Grapes — The
Wine Company in Rye, New York. His instincts were correct. Something
about a case of 1989 Chateau Petrus, a highly prized Bordeaux, didn't
look right to the other brokers.
So one of them cut the metal-foil capsule on the top
of the bottle to look inside. The cork underneath was branded with the
vintage date 1987, a less-valuable year. The wine was a fake.
As prices for old vintages of top labels like
Domaine de la Romanee Conti and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild have
skyrocketed, so has the number of counterfeit collectible wines.
New concerns about the authenticity of old wines
were raised again this week. Christie's International and Sotheby's,
the world's biggest auction houses, and collector Russell Frye said
they have received subpoenas from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
in connection with an investigation into counterfeit wines. Zachys, a
retailer and auction house in Scarsdale, New York, did not say whether
it had received a subpoena, but said it would cooperate fully with any
investigation.
Last autumn, Frye and another collector, William
Koch, filed high-profile lawsuits against Hardy Rodenstock, a German
wine merchant, claiming the bottles he sold as once belonging to Thomas
Jefferson were frauds. In fact, skeptics questioned the authenticity of
the cache of Jefferson bottles Rodenstock unearthed in a cellar in
Paris almost from the moment they were first publicized in the 1980s.
Though few in the auction houses, retailers and
chateaus want to talk about the problem, it has been on the minds of
winery owners as well as the French government. And they are trying to
do something about it.
In May 2004, France's official printing company
Imprimerie Nationale, under the Finance Ministry, then headed by
Nicolas Sarkozy, set up a commission to fight counterfeiting in every
field. Its study showed counterfeits accounted for about 9 percent of
the global economy.
Serge Tchekhov, the commission's wine expert, now works with Swiss wine-security company Algoril.
"In China and Vietnam, you find more counterfeit
than authentic bottles," Tchekhov said by telephone. "When one Bordeaux
cru bourgeois producer went to China several years ago, his importer
took him to shops and showed him all the fakes of his wines. He was
losing his market."
Fake first growths and crus classes are only a
fraction of the problem, Tchekhov said. More widespread are counterfeit
mid-range wines that never make it to the auction houses.
"When huge tankers of 60-cent red wine from the
Languedoc-Roussillon arrive in China, they're bottled with an
attractive Bordeaux chateau label and sold for much more," he said.
"When people taste the wine, that causes the image of Bordeaux to go
down."
Starting with the 2005 vintage, all wine bottles that travel outside France must be traceable, according to a new regulation.
Concern about the problem has pushed up prices of
wines that have perfect provenance, like the many old vintages of
Chateau Mouton auctioned off last week at Sotheby's. These went for two
to three times their estimates because they came directly from the
private cellar of Mouton's owner, Philippine de Rothschild.
Meanwhile, it may become easier to determine which
bottles are fakes in the future because more top chateaus are taking
steps to protect the authenticity of what is in the bottle. Christian
Moueix, head of Chateau Petrus and one of the first to speak out about
the issue a decade ago, tackles the problem by using high-tech labels
and engravings on the bottle.
At Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, steps include etching
the name of the estate in the glass at the bottom of the bottle, said
the technical director, Philippe Dhalluin. "Mouton started protecting
the authenticity of their bottles about 10 years ago," he said by
telephone.
Dhalluin declined to describe two other protections
for fear of tipping off potential counterfeiters. He said the Mouton
label is more difficult to copy than many because it shows a different
artwork on each vintage.
Algoril has just begun working to implement various
anti-counterfeiting and traceability methods with several Bordeaux
clients, including Le Cercle de Rive Droite, a group of producers on
the right bank of the Gironde river, and another group on the left bank
headed by Thierry Gardinier of Chateau Phelan Segur. These include
using a seal over the capsule, which would be broken when opened, and
labels on the back of the bottle with an individual algorithm of
letters and numbers and a serial number so each bottle can be tracked
on the Internet.
Even computer professionals are looking into solutions.
"Why not use radio-frequency-ID chips to give
bottles a unique ID?" said Kenneth Birman, a professor of computer
technology at Cornell University, adding that it could be done in a
such a way that pulling the cork would destroy the RFID.
Italian winery Arnaldo Caprai is testing just such an idea.
Some Bordeaux chateaus, including Chateau d'Issan,
rely on a "microtext" code hidden in the label design that is visible
only under magnification. This allows the wine to be traced to the
merchant who purchased it for resale. There is also a hologram built
into the label to make duplication more difficult.
Tchekhov is skeptical about the value of holograms.
He said he's visited a street in Shanghai where you can purchase copies
of many holograms soon after bottles have been released.
Even if a way to prevent counterfeit bottles is
discovered, wine fraud problems are unlikely to disappear. Last month,
a fine-wine dealer in Colorado, Ronald Wallace, pleaded guilty to
bilking millions from clients for undelivered wine futures.
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