BOGUS
WINE
Cornwell soon found 18 bottles of
a wine called Chateau Latour from
the 1970 vintage. He grabbed three
bottles, and he and his friends frolicked in the partner’s pool until the
early morning hours while guzzling
the blue-chip Bordeaux.
It was a night of two epiphanies.
One — which every wine maven
can recount in one way or another
— was the shock of discovering
that there really was something
special about the good stuff. “I had
to find out what the hell was going on, because the Latour was in
an altogether different league from
the kind of stuff that I was accustomed to drinking,” Cornwell says.
The other revelation was that
the good stuff wasn’t easy to come
by. Seeking to replace the missing
bottles, Cornwell discovered that
they weren’t simply sitting on the
shelves in the local wine store. And
when he did find two bottles, he discovered they cost what was then an
eye-popping $37 a bottle. (He never
did find a third bottle of the Latour,
and substituted another Bordeaux
with the blessing of the partner.)
Cornwell was a man on a mission
when he returned to law school.
“I went back to Charlottesville, where there was a little wine
shop. I was constantly going over
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there and buying whatever $7- or
$8-bottle of French wine that I
could find,” he says.
Over the ensuing years, Cornwell, now 59, built a law practice
in L.A. and a wine cellar that now
tops 5,000 bottles. He’s an authority on the wines of Burgundy,
and is an expert on such insanely
geeky subjects as the premature
“COUNTERFEITERS
HAVE MULTIPLIED
LIKE GERBILS.”
oxidation of white Burgundies.
He has also become winedom’s
No. 1 detective. Although Kurniawan’s exploits have been broadly
covered in trade publications,
newspapers and magazines — including New York and Vanity Fair
— until now Cornwell has remained relatively quiet about his
role in exposing the scams.
“I got really mad about the fact
that Rudy Kurniawan was getting
away with selling large quanti-