Wine fraud

Wine fraud is a form of fraud in which wines are sold to a customer illicitly, usually having the customer spend more money than the product is worth, or causing sickness due to harmful chemicals being mixed into the wine. Wine fraud can involve less expensive wines if they are sold in large volumes. Wine Spectator noted that some experts suspect that as much as 5% of the wine sold in secondary markets could be counterfeit.

Label fraud

One form of fraud involves affixing counterfeit labels of expensive wines to bottles of less expensive wine. In 2002, bottles of the weaker 1991 vintage of Château Lafite Rothschild were relabeled and sold as the acclaimed 1982 vintage in China. In 2000, Italian authorities uncovered a warehouse with nearly twenty thousand bottles of fake "Super Tuscan" 1995 Sassicaia and arrested a number of people including the group's salesperson, who was selling the fake wine out of the back of a Peugeot hatchback.

In 1995, police in Hong Kong discovered over 12,000 bottles of supposed Mouton Cadet in a supermarket. Although Mouton Cadet is not an expensive wine, thousands of people could be defrauded and the perpetrators could make substantial illegal profits.

Reporter Pierre-Marie Doutrelant "disclosed that many famous Champagne houses, when short on stock, bought bottled but unlabeled wine from cooperatives or one of the big private-label producers in the region, then sold it as their own".

A high-profile instance of alleged wine fraud was disclosed in early 2007, when it was reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into the counterfeiting of old and rare vintages (Wilke, McCoy).

Preventive actions

Some major producers are taking actions to prevent fraud of future vintages including marking bottles with engraved serial numbers on the glass and taking more control of the distribution process of their wines. However, for older vintages, the threat of fraud persists.

Wine blending

More common is the practice of blending inexpensive wine with more expensive wine or other materials and selling it at the higher price. A highly regarded wine shipping company, Henri Cruse of the famous Cruse Winemaking Family, was implicated in the blending of cheap Rioja wine into Bordeaux wine. The Bordeaux wine fraud scandal in 1973 forced the sale of Château Pontet-Canet.

In 1988, a whistle blower in Château Giscours, classified as one of the 65 best vineyards of Bordeaux, revealed that the château illegally blended lesser vintages of the property into more valuable ones, which were sold at the higher price, in addition to other crimes of fraud and deception.

Reporter Doutrelant reported the comments of "a government inspector on the illegal use of sugar to boost the alcoholic content of Beaujolais-Villages: 'If the law had been enforced in 1973 and 1974, at least a thousand producers would have put out of business'". The same writer explained how growers "planted Mourvèdre and Syrah, two low-yield grapes that give the wine finesse, strictly for the benefit of the government inspectors. Then, when the inspectors left, they grafted cheap, high-yield vines, Grenache and Carignan, back onto the vines".

In March 2008, allegations were made against producers of Brunello di Montalcino that there were illegally blended other types of grape varieties into wine stipulated to be of 100% Sangiovese, allegedly to inflate production and increase profit, in a scandal termed "Brunellopoli".

Burgundy wine blending

Many Burgundy wine shippers have been found guilty of blending inexpensive wine with red Burgundies and exporting them at exorbitant prices. The Vins Georges Duboeuf company was found guilty in 2005 of illegally mixing low-grade wine with fine vintages. The court found that both "fraud and attempted fraud concerning the origin and quality of wines" had been committed. One particularly blatant Burgundy shipper, Bernard Grivelet, bottled inferior wine from elsewhere in France and sold it in magnum and double magnum bottles as Burgundy in 2001.

In 2002, Jacques Hemmer, a Bordeaux shipper, was caught blending cheap wines from southern France into much more expensive Bordeaux. He was convicted of his crime and paid a fine.

Hazardous materials

Twenty-three people died in 1986 because a fraudulent winemaker in Italy blended toxic methanol (wood alcohol) into his low-alcohol wine to increase its alcohol content.

In 1985, diethylene glycol appeared to have been added as an adulterant by some Austrian producers of white wines to make them sweeter and upgrade the dry wines to sweet wines; production of sweet wines is expensive and addition of sugar is easy to detect. Fortunately, the amount added was not high enough to be toxic except at impossibly high (for most people) levels of consumption (one would have needed to ingest about 28 bottles per day for approximately two weeks in order to suffer fatal effects).

Sources

• Barr, Andrew. Wine Snobbery. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
• Fielden, Christopher. “Is this the Wine You Ordered, Sir?”: The Dark Side of the Wine Trade. London: Helm, 1990.
• Hallgarten, Fritz. Wine Scandal. NY: Time Warner, 1988.
• Berger, Dan, Napa Valley Register (August 10, 2004). Why wine scandals rarely hit U.S.

Footnotes