Archive for the 'wine collecting' Category

More on Rudy K’s arrest on counterfeiting charges

The story of Rudy Kurniawan’s arrest on charges of selling counterfeit wine has been all over the news since the FBI arrested him on Thursday. Here’s some of the recent action:

* WineDiarist and Wine Spectator have published photos from federal prosecutors taken from the scene of the alleged crime; one of those, with stacks of Petrus 1950 and Lafleur 1947 labels among others, is reproduced above.

* The complaint states that Kurniawan had been living illegally in the US since 2003. He tallied $16 million in American Express bills between 2006 – 2011. He ran up $11 million of debt in 2007 alone. At the time of the arrest, he had a Lamborghini, a Mercedes-Benz and a Range Rover in the garage.

* Eric Asimov writes in the NYT about the arrest and recalls the go-go days, when Rudy Kurniawan apparently used his tasting ability to make him an arbiter on what on the table was fake and what was not. Asimov also tweeted a link to this 2008 Men’s Vogue piece by Jay McInerney on “billionaire winos.”

* Dirty South Wine wonders which California wines were found at the scene that were intended to be passed off as Bordeaux?

* Be sure to check out that fascinating comments on WineDiarist, where Bill Klapp calls the whole thing a “victimless crime,” Laurent Ponsot says he has been working with the FBI for years, and Paul Wasserman describes his former association with Rudy K. at the Wine Hotel, an LA wine retail and storage facility.

UPDATE: Robert Parker posted this on this site over the weekend: “It will be interesting to discover if RK was just an independent operator or part of an entire network….I can’t remember the exact date when two FBI agents spent much of a day with me discussing fraud in fine wine after I had written an article about it in my Bordeaux book, but I think it was the early or mid-90s…while they revealed little of what they knew, it was apparent this was an active case,and centered around the fabrication of fraudulent bottles…I wonder if the RK case is part of that same investigation of nearly 17-18 years ago….any ex-FBI people out there that know how long they will keep a case open?”

Arresting development: FBI charges Rudy K of counterfeiting fine wine

The FBI arrested the man known as Rudy Kurniawan at his home in Arcadia, California yesterday on charges of selling counterfeit wine. Inside the home, the authorities found materials used for making counterfeit wine bottles. They charged him with selling $1.3 million of fake wine but in 2006 alone, Kurniawan sold $33 million of wine at auction. They also charged him with “fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in loans to finance what prosecutors called his ‘high-end lifestyle.” Check out all the details to this fascinating story in this piece at nytimes.com.

One thing that baffles me is how a fraudster could sell wines that, in fact, were never made. One example: the feds have charged Kurniawan with selling a bottle of 1929 Ponsot but Ponsot only started estate bottling in 1934. If one were to make and sell fake wine, don’t you think you’d take the time to make sure that the wines you were counterfeiting actually existed? And what of the auctioneers, did they not this or did they turn a blind eye to it? It will be interesting to learn more details as they emerge.

For those who think the FBI just roots around for terrorists, there’s apparently an elite unit that targets fraud in art and collectibles. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the movie version of this story. Against a background of wealth porn, a brash young collector emerges on the scene; a go-go auction atmosphere; duplicity and gullibility; an angry billionaire seeking vengeance; and members of the elite FBI unit. We’ve discussed casting options for the first part of this saga before but hopefully someone in Hollywood will give this project a green light. I’m ready to head over to Starbucks right now with my Mac to play the part of screen writer right now!

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

Henschke Hill of Grace says goodbye screwcap, hello Vino-Lok

The 2008 vintage of Henschke Hill of Grace has not yet been released. But when it comes out, the wine that is arguably Australia’s finest single-vineyard wine, and priced at around $500, will be sealed with neither screwcap nor cork; It will be closed with Vino-Lok.

Stephen Henschke became enamored with the technology when he presented a paper at a conference in Germany in 2004. He brought some of the glass closures back to Australia and tested some bottles of Hill of Grace with Vino-Lok in collaboration with the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI). Now with five years of testing and bottle age, Henschke is pleased with the evolution and will convert half of the 2008 production of Hill of Grace to Vino-Lok. The past few vintages have been entirely under screwcap.

“We have always viewed screwcap as a transitional closure, poised between cork and, well, we don’t know what,” Henschke told me in New York yesterday.

Vino-Lok, known (if at all) as Vino-Seal in the US, is a glass stopper that has an inner elastic ring that forms a seal with the bottle. Over on the Vino-Lok site, they say that it opens with a “click.” Henschke says they look “cool.” He’s so pleased with the closure that he has just installed the first Vino-Lok bottling line in Australia at his winery.

Vino-Lok touts its ability to age wines. And Henschke agrees that the evolution is slow, akin to magnums that are considered the ideal size for cellaring. “I call a [750 ml] bottle under Vino-Lok a half a magnum,” he says. “That’s how well it ages.”

Is the world of fine and collectible wine ready for a new closure? We will find out in the next year or so with the release of the 2008 Hill of Grace.

Wine fraud bilks British investors [BBC]


Wine investment fraud may run £30 million a year according to a source in a BBC investigative segment that aired last night. It’s interesting, though hardly surprising, to note the fraud story moving beyond simply counterfeit bottles.

The segment on wine fraud highlighted an investor group that lost 50,000 when the wines it purchased were never delivered. While it is tragic, it’s even more tragic that one of the bilked investors admitted that he couldn’t afford to lose the money. Perhaps he should have bought wines to drink, rather than ones for speculating on.

Simon Staples of BBR in London cites 400 percent returns on wine in 18 months. Jim Budd notes that he keeps a list of 60 merchants that he wouldn’t deal with and cited the £30 million a year figure. What do you think of that estimate–low or high?

Caveat emptor!

Divers find old champagne and immediately chug it


Nordic divers have found a cache of old champagne bottles on a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. Christian Ekstrom (pictured above via BBC) and his dive partners could not contain their enthusiasm at finding the intact bottles that may date from the late 18th century. So they brought one to the surface, uncorked it, and had a swig. Which statement below captures their reaction?

A) “Damn, it’s only nonvintage yellow label, which hardly keeps from one Christmas to the next. Oh, and the bloody thing is corked!”

B) “It was fantastic… it had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles.”

Well, if you guessed (B) then you are right! I personally hate it when the oak doesn’t integrate after 220 years though.

In shades of Rodenstockian abundance, a Reuters story says that the diver does not yet know the number of bottles in the cache. The same story quotes Champagne expert Richard Juhlin saying that he thinks it is late-18th century, from the Clicquot house, and valued at about $68,000 a bottle.

Related: “Cristal at 20,000 leagues under the sea

Vintage port: 1948 Taylor, 1945 Fonseca, 1927 Niepoort

How far would you drive to taste some vintage port? That’s most often a rhetorical question but I actually confronted it head on last week as a rare vertical tasting including some legendary wines came on the agenda in Montreal. Since I tucked away some 2003 Fonseca from one son’s birth year, I thought this would at the very least offer a something of a preview of how it will taste when we drink it together in 2024 and beyond. So I hopped in the car. Read more…

Vinfolio, a fine wine retailer, restructures

News of a bounced check from Vinfolio, the fine wine retailer and auctioneer, appeared yesterday morning on eBob. By the afternoon, the CEO, Steve Bachmann, posted this to his blog:

After three years of very rapid growth — placing it among the top 15 fastest growing private companies in the SF Bay area from 2006 to 2008, Vinfolio experienced a much more difficult sales environment during 2009. A few weeks ago, we found ourselves in need of additional capital on a very near-term basis. The company investigated several options but new capital could not be obtained on a necessarily compressed timetable. Because of the situation, and to safeguard the interests of our customers and creditors (including for wine purchases, wine sales, and wine stored with Vinfolio), the board of directors and the shareholders of Vinfolio approved and undertook a form of restructuring known as an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (the “Assignment”) on Friday evening, January 15, to provide the business with the flexibility to develop the appropriate course of action going forward.

The San Francisco-based company had just raised $4.5 million in September, they said to fund an expansion in Asia. According to the same article, the company, founded in 2003, had raised $6.1 million in previous rounds of financing (both debt and equity).

The company sources fine wine from collectors, wineries and has an importer’s license. Their other offerings include VinCellar, a system for wine inventory management, both on computers and as an iPhone app. The company also has 17,000 square feet of temperature-controlled storage for customers. Last July, the company launched VinFolio Marketplace, an online marketplace where not only wineries and importers could list wines for sale, but individual collectors could sell wines from their collection to one another. When launched, the company proclaimed that it enabled “access to the $500+ million in wine” making it the “world’s largest fine wine marketplace.” At the time of launch, in any given Marketplace transaction, the seller incurred a fee but the buyer did not.

In his post, Bachmann said that operations will continue during Assignment, a state-level insolvency measure. But in the eBob forum, several commenters on eBob debated whether collectors with wine in storage should arrange for immediate pick-up of their wines.

Time to belly up to the barcode? [scanners]

You just brought home a mixed case of wine from the store. Already, things are looking good. But what if you could scan each bottle as you unpack it and have the information appear in a database for managing your inventory? Or just for keeping all your tasting notes handy and organized?

To find out if it’s time for wine lovers to belly up to the barcode, I tested two newish products that claim to zap and upload: the IntelliScanner mini and the new version of Cor.kz, an iPhone app. Read more…


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