BOGUS
WINE
highly prized old and rare Burgundies offered for sale are bogus.
There’s a reason why the number of fakes keeps growing. One is
the inability of many collectors to
tell that the rare vintage they’ve
just opened for their special
guests is just filler.
“There are very few people in the
world who actually know what old
wines taste like,” says John Tilson,
founder of the Underground Wineletter, a small online magazine that
has spotlighted wine fraud since
the 1980s. “That’s what makes
wine fraud so easy to do.”
Then there’s complicity. Rather
than blowing the whistle on a
counterfeiter, many duped buyers
prefer to recoup their losses by
reselling the phony wine to other
unsuspecting buyers. Cornwell
has tracked several cases in which
wealthy collectors purchased millions in counterfeit wine. But instead of calling the authorities
and surrendering the bogus bottles, the collectors resold them to
other unknowing collectors.
And so a simple and depressing
logic has come to rule the market
for old and rare wines. Counterfeit
bottles tend to remain in circulation
because they keep being resold