Dr Vino's wine blog

The arrest of Rudy Kurniawan on March 8 coincided with the top in the fine wine market this year.

Even though Kurniawan–whose guilt or innocence on wine counterfeiting charges remains to be tried in federal court–was apprehended, wine fraud remains an easy crime: combine sky-high prices with an old collectible whose authenticity may be difficult to verify and willing buyers who may have more capital than wine know-how or may have little intention of ever opening the bottles anyway.

Wine counterfeiting has been around for decades and I’ve always been surprised that it doesn’t get priced in to the fine wine market (but wines sold directly from the producers do fetch a premium). Paul Chiu, a Burgundy fan in Hong Kong, tweeted to me the other day that there’s still surprisingly little discussion about counterfeiting there.

So, as the ArtInfo points out, the decline in the (young) Bordeaux index probably has more to do with shifting (more discriminating?) tastes to old wine and Burgundy since the broader Liv-Ex 100 has not fallen as sharply. “Lafite is out, and Conti is in.” Ack, if the auction market’s taste for Burgundy shifts into high gear, it could crush even a non-collector’s premier cru habit.

But with the Chinese economy slowing down, FT Alphaville suggests some cynics might point out that fewer wines are needed for bribes. Baksheesh aside, it will be interesting to see if, going forward, counterfeiting or the Chinese economic slowdown impacts fine wine prices more. But maybe there will be more buyers, such as the Stamford Management Group, which is raising $100 million for a fund to buy Bordeaux and jade antiques. And perhaps there will be more liquidity and lower spreads if SecondMarket really gets into wine.

Two Buck Chuck turns ten this year.

We were reminded that Fred Franzia’s Bronco Wine Co. owns 40,000 acres of vines in the San Joaquin Valley, debt-free, which helps keep the wine price so low.

How big is a 40,000 acre vineyard? It’s about 50 times the size of Central Park, and, in fact, about three times the land area of Manhattan. So it must suck if you forget something at one end since there’s not even a subway in the Bronco vineyard.

“Evaluating the taste and cost of “Two-Buck Chuck”‘ [KALW.org]
“3 charged in pregnant farm worker’s death” [AP]
“Drink up: The rise of really cheap wine” [NewYorker.com]

The other day, I was speaking with someone who relayed a conversation that he had with a vintner in Temecula, an area with over 1,000 acres vineyards about an hour and a half from LA and San Diego. The guy asked the vintner why he didn’t try to make better wines. The vintner replied that he had a busload of bachelorettes coming through this weekend and one the weekend after that, implying he was already selling all his wine to locals more interested in quantity rather than quality.

It’s a problem that a lot of American wine regions confront: Long Island’s vineyards, Napa and Sonoma, the Willamette Valley, to name a few, are among all within a bachelorette bus ride from metropolitan areas. As a result, many wineries have policies banning buses and limos; free wine tastings are the rare exception, rather than the norm, in an attempt to push tourism away from quantity.

How to break out of the chug-a-lug trap and focus on quality? It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg problem: if there’s little local quality, then there’s mot much to support with your purchases; if there’s little financial reward, then there’s not going to be much quality. Locavorism may break the cycle though as foodies in a given area pay a premium for quality local foods, wine included. The Times today mentions one sommelier, Thomas Pastuszak at NoMad in NYC, who has 17 Rieslings from the Finger Lakes on his list. Clearly he is voting for quality from the Finger Lakes region with his checkbook.

But for many wine enthusiasts, the wine regions in close proximity don’t offer the kind of quality that they could order from 17 different local(ish) wineries. As my research from a few years ago showed, while local wine is almost always the best option from a greenhouse gas perspective, the carbon footprint of wine is greatly reduced by a boat journey as opposed to truck, sometimes to a surprising degree, and lighter packaging also offsets sheer distance. Thus many wine enthusiasts I’ve spoken with about the issue over the years would rather support a grower with a similar mindset to theirs, be it organic or stylistic, rather than a strictly local one and hope for GHG efficiencies en route or perform offsets elsewhere in their lives.

I’m interested to hear from you: which do you think represents the greater opportunity for improving quality particularly in far-flung or emerging domestic wine regions, tourism or locavorism?

New York magazine has a lengthy piece by Benjamin Wallace (author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar) on counterfeiting wine and the saga of Rudy Kurniawan. Grab a magnum of coffee and check it out.

American wine under $15 is a difficult category. And domestic pinot can be downright dicey. And charity wines often sacrifice quality for the good of the cause.

So it was with skepticism that I tried the Grochau Cellars, “Commuter Cuvee” 2010 recently. Sold in Portland at $14.99 with a portion of the proceeds going to a bicycle safety non-profit. It’s actually a gulpable pinot noir with good acidity and the bing cherry note often found in Oregon pinots. It glides in at 12.5% alcohol; if there’s a better pinot noir available in the US under $15, I have yet to try it.

I spoke with John Grochau about how he could offer a 100% pinot noir for a reasonable price. Grochau has cycled at a high level for about 20 years (he even won a race last year) but into the front-of-house in the restaurant business, which led him to make his own wine label, sourcing fruit from various sites around the state and making the wines in Portland. In 2010 he found a vineyard site with 22-year-old vines whose owner was suddenly looking to sell 20 tons of fruit. It was a cooler vintage, which John prefers, but enough for good ripeness (the grapes were 22 Brix). He made this wine in actual barrels, which is decidedly rare for pinots at this price point. He also added some of the wines that he selected out of his higher-end pinots. It’s a low-margin wine, he admits, but he’s doing it again: The 2011, also from a cool vintage, will be released soon.

Thanks to site reader Gabe for pointing out this wine in the comments of a previous post. A perfect wine for National Bike Month!

Rudy Kurniawan, aka “Dr. Conti” aka “Mr. 47,” was indicted on four counts of counterfeiting, mail fraud and wire fraud in federal court yesterday. Mike Steinberger posted the 25-page indictment signed by US Attorney Preet Bharara to his blog.

The indictment largely covers the same ground as the documents filed when Kurniawan was apprehended in his home in L.A. in March. It fails to name the auction house where Kurniawan was the consignor of wines in 2008 where Laurent Ponsot dramatically stopped the sale in the room even though it has been widely reported. Nor does it mention the London auction house where he allegedly sold fraudulent bottles through a front man even though it was widely discussed. The front man’s identity at that auction is not revealed; the New York City restaurant that shipped empty bottles to his home remains anonymous and several collectors are mentioned but not named. Further, the “relatively recent” California wines that were to indicated to pass off as older Bordeaux and Burgundy have not been named. So there are still some gaps to the story. But details will emerge as the legal proceedings continue; also, two articles in major, non-wine magazines are in the works.

The case is U.S. v. Kurniawan, 12-MAG-606, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

Last week, Pancho Campo resigned from the Institute of Masters of Wine. An email from the Institute’s executive director said that “in light of his move into more sports and music events and away from wine, he has decided to resign his membership of the Institute of Masters of Wine, effective immediately.” The Institute had commissioned an independent investigation–the findings of that report were about to be released.

A couple of weeks ago, Robert Parker released his own investigation into the Campo/Miller tours of Spain (For a backgrounder, read “No Jay, no pay.”). The summary report stated that no actual impropriety occurred yet suggested revisions to the ethics statement to apply to all Wine Advocate contributors, not just Parker. The report prompted a lengthy thread on eRobertParker.com, including a stunning intervention that laid out a chronology of some of the events and said that the “decent and classy” thing to do would be to apologize to Jim Budd, who had reported on each development of the scandal on his blog and had documented cooperated with Parker’s lawyers despite Parker’s insistence to the contrary.

The conversation there shifted to the topic of whether Antonio Galloni should have attended an importer’s lavish dinner in the company of producers from Burgundy, California, and Italy whose wines he reviews as well as some big-time collectors, including a member of the Forbes billionaire list. After responding to some questions, Galloni accused his questioners of having an “agenda” and complained of how tiresome it is to attend dinners and constantly field questions about “wines, vintages, producers, the WA etc.”

Yesterday, Jay Miller posted a comment on eBob arguing that since 2006 (when he was hired) all Wine Advocate contributors should have been employees, not “independent contractors,” been banned from schmoozing with the trade, and have any outside activities pre-approved by Parker.

Robert Parker long ago laid down an admirable set of standards for wine writers. If those are no longer tenable for the Wine Advocate, they should be altered. If they are still tenable, they should be applied to all contributors at the publication.

Related: “Does the Wine Advocate buy over $700,000 worth of wine a year?“

At the polls yesterday, French voters bid adieu to President Sarkozy who was famously, and incongruously, a teetotaler as head of France. “President Bling Bling,” as he was known, will now be replaced by “Mr. Normal,” Francois Hollande. As far as our beat is concerned, does that mean that a wine-lover will be returning to the Elysée Palace?

The last Socialist occupant, Francois Mitterrand, was a fan of the fruits of the vine. Segolene Royal, former partner of Francois Hollande and mother of his four children, said when she ran against Sarkozy in 2007 that while working as an adviser to late president Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s, she “learned that eating and drinking were the two pillars of the French art de vivre.” So there’s hope. And Hollande’s current partner, Valerie Trierweiler, was born in Angers and likes his cooking even if he uses too much butter. So there is hope, from a wine geek’s perspective, that he is a Champagne Socialist who might even be able to talk about the terroir.

Hit the comments with any intel you might have about le vin d’Hollande. And note the wine in the above photo.