Dr Vino's wine blog

Is this the first Kurniawan wine auction bidders can trust?

Last year, Rudy Kurniawan, 39, started serving a 10-year jail term for wine counterfeiting.

Starting tomorrow, the US Marshals will be auctioning off 4,711 bottles of wine the seized from Kurniawan.

“It may sound ironic that we are selling wine that belonged to a convicted wine counterfeiter,” said Assistant Program Manager Jason Martinez of the U.S. Marshals Service Asset Forfeiture Division, “but we are duty-bound to recoup as much value from the sale of these authentic wines as possible to compensate those who were victims of his fraud.”

To the victims go the spoils? It will be interesting to see if the Kurniawan stigma keeps bidders away or if the third party authentication done by Michael Egan who was one of the principal expert witnesses for the prosecution will assuage those fears. (Stephanie Reeves of Houston is also appraising and authenticating the bottles.)

The wine has been stored at a California wine storage facility while Rudy Kurniawan himself is serving his sentence at the Taft Correctional Institute.

Bidding for the wines on the block begins online tomorrow and continues on December 1. There is no buyer’s premium at the US Marshals’ Kurniawan wine auction. And, well, caveat emptor.

See the lot listings

Last week, a story broke about The White Club, a group with $25k annual dues that staged lavish, wine-centric dinners around the world. We mentioned the fill-and-refill scam in Friday’s post about fake wine.

Since then, some details have emerged about the attendees. Jancis Robinson published a post detailing how she had attended three of the White Club dinners and was “taken in” by the organizers (adding, “My colleagues John Stimpfig and Neal Martin were too.”). She suspects that the wines at the first dinner, outside of Copenhagen, were mostly real. By the second dinner, in Bern, the pouring was taking place in another room. And by the third dinner, in November 2011 in Hong Kong, she writes that the organizer “by this point must have thought I was a real mug because it was quite clear that many of these wines were not at all as they should be. It was all decidedly embarrassing.” She has removed any comments about the wines from her site.

Neal Martin, author of Pomerol and Wine Advocate contributor, has yet to comment on The White Club. Over on WineBerserkers, a commenter posted one of Martin’s tasting notes for a Petrus 1970 from one of the dinners: “This is probably one of the finest bottles of Petrus I have encountered. Drink now-2030. Tasted September 2012.”

Old bottles are famously variable. In fact, there’s a saying that there aren’t good wines, there are only good bottles. Apparently there are also fake bottles. So, remind me, what’s the point of tasting old wines (especially not ex-cellar) and publishing notes on them? At the very least, participants should be obliged to take a big shot of skepticism before proceeding.

This week, Olivier Cousin went before a judge. The heinous crime of the pony-tailed vigneron? Truth in labeling.

Here’s the story (which we’ve mentioned before but it’s worth a recap): Cousin farms 12 acres organically–neigh, biodynamically for Cousin who tills his vineyards with horse-drawn plows. In those vineyards in the town of Anjou, he has a lot of cabernet franc, known locally as Breton. So he labeled his 100% cabernet franc wine grown in Anjou as “Anjou Pur Breton.” So far so good, right?

The only catch is that the appellation retains the right to the term Anjou on wine labels and wines bearing the term must meet their criteria, including a blind tasting by committee. And Cousin quit the AOC in 2005 telling journo-blogger Jim Budd, “I stopped because the AOC is for industrial wines as the rules permit everything: weedkillers, huge yields, additives etc.” So the appellation authorities have dropped the legal hammer (gavel?) on Cousin and brought him to court. Read more…

CBS Sunday Morning ran a 10-minute segment on wine fraud yesterday. The full segment is embedded above.

It centers on Bill Koch, including having the CBS correspondent walking around his cavernous cellar at his Palm Beach home, discussing his various counterfeit bottles. The segment also mentions the Kurniawan trial, talks with Maureen Downey, and examines some anti-counterfeiting technology at Opus One.

While it is an important and interesting subject, the piece could have been stronger. Interviewing other collectors, auction houses, some of the three Burgundy producers who testified at the trial or a wine critic would have made for a stronger segment–while Opus One may be faked in China, Bill Koch does not complain of having fave bottles of it in his cellar, so it would have made a tighter segment to have one of the producers involved his his story.

At any rate, it’s good to see the story getting reaching a broader audience. I was at a Christmas party over the weekend where people were talking about the trial, so it’s good the story is getting out there. A lot of people said it would make a great movie and I agree–maybe one day it will reach the silver screen.

The jury has returned a verdict: Rudy Kurniawan has been found guilty of selling counterfeit wine through the mail and engaging in wire fraud. Judge Richard Berman will announce the sentencing on April 24; Kurniawan could spend 40 years in federal prison. Read more…

A jury in Manhattan sided with Bill Koch in his lawsuit over 24 counterfeit wines. The collector extraordinaire and energy magnate had sued Eric Greenberg, a wine collector who at one point had a cellar of 70,000 bottles, for selling him the counterfeit bottles. The jury awarded Koch $379,000 in damages to cover the fraudulent bottles and will reconvene this morning to see consider punitive damages.

Bloomberg has the full story including some of Koch’s comments after the trial:

“I absolutely can’t stand to be cheated. Now we got one faker so we’re marching down our hit list of fakers. This is just a start.”

“Millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of counterfeit wines are sold every year. The counterfeiters don’t want anyone to know, for $100 they make it and mark it up to $15,000, I myself paid $100,000 for a counterfeit wine. To me the whole industry is corrupt.”

“What Greenberg did was treat me and Zachys the way you treat mushrooms–kept in the dark and fed manure.”

“I’m thirsty, I want a glass of wine,” Koch said before repairing to restaurant Daniel. “And if it’s not a good bottle, I’m going to sue them.”

Yesterday, Robert Parker posted to his site that the Wine Advocate is suing their former critic Antonio Galloni. They charge him with misappropriation of confidential information, defamation and fraud among other things. Courthouse News has a summary and Jeff Leve has published the full text of the complait to his site.

At the crux of the complaint, the Wine Advocate alleges that Galloni went to Sonoma on their dime and as the critic. (Apparently there are other pending reviews involving Burgundy, Brunello and Barolo.) I posted a few weeks ago that I thought Galloni should turn over whatever he had at that point and to withhold notes was petty and unseemly. In something of a defense, some people said that because he was an independent contractor, he might have been paid only upon submission of the material. However, the complaint states that he was paid a salary of $25,000 a month (plus $5,840 a month for expenses) for his duties to deliver certain material. The complaint alleges that he had a “secret scheme” to visit wineries “throughout the world” while developing his own wine reviewing business. In that business, the complaint alleges he will be using their “proprietary 50-100 point grading scale” and was authorized only to do so for their publication.

Since Galloni’s own web site has still not launched, it seemed a hasty decision to jump ship. As I mentioned in the comments of my last post, when he went to the Times to announce his departure from the Wine Advocate in February, it read to me like a giant “will work for food or Barolo” notice of his availability on the job market rather than an announcement of his own project. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. But one thing is for sure: Parker & Co. are making Galloni’s life difficult. Galloni has yet to reply to the complaint.

As to the Wine Advocate, the new editor-in-chief noted on eBob that they will be taking on “3 new very talented reviewers.” She cited “varying notice periods” the writers had to give their current publications as the reason for the delay in announcing their identities.

Daniel Boulud’s various restaurants have attracted wine geeks not just for the thoughtful food preparations to pair with the fruits of the vine but also for the gems in the cellar. Michael Madrigale at Boulud Sud and Bar Boulud has been offering glass pours from rare big bottles for a while.

Now Caleb Ganzer, the new sommelier at DB Bistro Modern in midtown, and Daniel Johnnes, Corporate Wine Director for the Boulud restaurants, have started public bidding for wines on Twitter that prospective diners can enjoy in the restaurant. Each Monday at noon, he lists a wine’s starting bid, tags it with #DBwinebid, and, via Twitter, the can bid it up during the following 24 hours or so (highest bid at 5 PM each Tuesday wins). Recent offerings included a 2011 Turley white zinfandel starting at $10, a 1988 Gruaud Larose that was won for $80, and Coche-Dury Meursault 2008 for $160. The current offering is a G. Roumier, Chambolle-Musigny, 2009 with a bid of $100, cheaper than many retailers list the wine. Don’t forget that in a timed online auction, sniping can often lead to success.