BOGUS
WINE
Welcome to the underbelly of
the fine wine market, a sometimes
lawless place where scammers often have free rein to repackage
and reconstitute lesser vintages as
premier vino, pocketing handsome
sums of money along the way. Wine
is easy to enjoy, fun to learn about
and nearly impossible to totally
master. That’s one reason counterfeiters have multiplied like gerbils.
The wine auction market generated about $478 million in revenue
last year, up about 17 percent from
2010, according to the Wine Spec-
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
tator. Eager collectors have turned
New York, London and lately, Hong
Kong, into the world’s auction capitals. Many more millions of dollars change hands in private sales.
All of this happens despite the
fact that many of the old and rare
wines in the market are almost certainly fake, according to vintners
and investigators like Cornwell,
who has become one of the world’s
leading wine sleuths in the years
since he walked into the basement
of that Los Angeles wine store.
Laurent Ponsot, the owner of
one of Burgundy’s most prestigious wines, Domaine Ponsot,
estimates that 80 percent of the
Cornwell
displays his
extensive
collection of
wine auction
guides.