BOGUS
WINE
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
ON CORNWELL SAYS he got his first
real look at wine counterfeiting in 1986
as a young attorney working in Los
Angeles when the manager of a local
wine store ushered him into the store’s
basement. “It was unbelievable,”
Cornwell recalls. “The owner had been
routinely turning cases of 1983 Bordeaux into cases of 1982 Bordeaux.”
In Bordeaux, 1983 was a pretty good
year. But 1982 was at the top of the
heap. Legendary. The owner’s sleight
of hand potentially added thousands of
dollars to the value of the wine.
“It was done rather crudely,”
Cornwell says. “He had sanded
off the 1983 vintage date on
the wooden crates the wine is
shipped in, and burned in 1982.”
A local printer, meanwhile, provided bogus labels for each bottle.
That allowed the store’s owner
to turn wines like a 1983 La Mission Haut Brion (a very good wine
that now retails for around $250
a bottle) into a 1982 La Mission
Haut Brion (a magnificent wine
that often sells for $1,000 or
more in today’s market.)
The local district attorney
eventually launched an investigation of the storeowner, but
the probe petered out. And the
manager Cornwell tried to help?
The owner fired him.