How to spot a fake wine
“Vintage Crime”, a new history, looks at “Winegate” and other scandals
To make a 1945 Mouton Rothschild, mix two parts Château Cos d’Estornel to one part Château Palmer and California cabernet. That was the strategy of Rudy Kurniawan, a wine fraudster, who poured his mixture of wines into old bottles with fake labels and sold them to gullible collectors. In 2014 he was sentenced to ten years in an American prison and ordered to forfeit $20m and to pay another $28m to victims.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Bottle shock”
From the November 18th 2023 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Culture
Ovation inflation has spread from Broadway to London’s West End
Why do dud plays get standing ovations?
Are mystics kooks or valuable disrupters?
A realist’s refreshing take on mysticism
Sex and Snow White: how Grimm should children’s books be?
The German authors suggest very, but today trends run the opposite way
Jimmy Lai’s trial is a headline-worthy example of injustice
A new biography aims to keep the public’s attention on the pro-democracy tycoon
Millennials and Gen Z are falling hard for stuffed animals
Plushies are cute, cuddly and costly
Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, satire is under siege
Public support is waning for the right to offend