BOGUS
WINE
solute truth.” (It was Barzelay who
first alerted the owner of Domaine
Ponsot that Kurniawan was selling
suspicious bottlings of Ponsot at
the Acker auction in 2008.)
Cornwell’s detective work had
produced a laundry list of counterfeiting errors committed by
Kurniawan. He published these
as well: There were missing accents and misspellings on some
of the labels and bottle numbers
with too many digits or too few.
The capsules — the wrapping
that covers the cork and the top
of the bottle — might look old,
while the labels looked fresh and
clean. Some wines had the wrong
capsules. Others had the wrong
kind of glass. In some cases, there
just too many bottles of stupendously rare vintages. Only seven
bottles of the 1966 DRC Montrachet had reached the auction
market since 1996, but Kurniawan
claimed to have 14 available for
sale from his own personal cellar.
“Surely this requires, at a minimum, a detailed description of
the provenance of these bottles,”
Cornwell wrote.
Cornwell’s posts went viral.
Spectrum resisted at first, but
finally removed Kurniawan’s
bottles from the sale, saying it
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
planned to sue Kurniawan if the
wines were proven to be bogus.
FBI agents arrested Kurniawan
in Los Angeles last March, less
than a month after Cornwell posted his notes on the Internet, and
charged him with four counts of
mail and wire fraud. He has pleaded not guilty and is jailed without
bail in the federal detention center in Brooklyn. His lawyer did not
respond to requests for comment.
“The revelation that Rudy was
continuing, with seeming impunity, to manufacture and sell
millions of dollars of counterfeit
wine in the marketplace, may have
played a significant role in the government’s decision to arrest him,”
Doug Barzelay, the Burgundy-loving New York lawyer, wrote in essay published on the Internet.
At the Los Angeles home Kurniawan shared with his mother,
authorities found a counterfeiting
factory. The feds seized hundreds
of wine labels, corks and stamps.
Kurniawan, the government says,
used California cabernet in an
effort to mimic the taste of bluechip Bordeaux wines, and California pinot noir to do the same
thing for Burgundy bottlings.
The jury is still out on the impact of Kurniawan’s downfall.
John Tilson of the Underground
Wineletter said the level of worldwide wine fraud remains “outra-