The Wine Forger’s Handbook: A Brief History of Wine Forgery ( CHAPTER TWO)

Fake or forgery?

Fakes and forgeries are not tautological.

A fake is a genuine object that has been tampered with for the purpose of deception. In wine terms this means a bottle in which the contents do not match the label—for example, pouring cheaper stuff into a bottle with a label that imitates the good stuff, or taking a bottle of an inferior, less expensive vintage and relabeling it with a better, more expensive vintage.

A forgery is an object made in fraudulent imitation of something—bottles and labels that are an attempt to copy the real thing. Forgeries vary in their ingenuity. Some are very crude—relying on photocopied labels, for example—while others are much more sophisticated. For example, Rodenstock was alleged to have used a dental drill to carve Thomas Jefferson’s initials into the now apparently fraudulent Lafite bottles.

Forged examples of Banksy canvases have been a recent trend. Because of his mysterious persona, he is unlikely to complain to the police. A study by Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques Unit found that, for an investment of £6 ($10), they could precisely reproduce, with 100% authentic materials, a Banksy spray-paint artwork that would sell for a high-five figure sum at auction. But for Banksy, who began his career as a renegade graffiti artist by sneaking his own, intentionally poor paintings into museums and seeing how long it would take for the curators to notice them hanging there, forgeries might be said to help maintain his reputation and prices. Similarly, Bordeaux châteaux never complain and never explain about fake and forged bottles of their wines so as not to upset the market. It is unlikely that a wine estate would ever create a “notion of authenticity” à la the Musée Rodin.

Con artists have also attempted “reverse” fraud, when a buyer claims he has been sold a fake and sends back a replica. Auction houses and retailers have to deal with this kind of conduct all the time.

Scammers also use EBay and other online platforms to lure buyers with a sought-after fine wine. A recent example of this used a digitally altered image of a genuine bottle being offered from a merchant. The scammer’s image on EBay made it look in far better condition than it actually was. It was being offered at twice the price of the merchant. When the bottle is purchased via EBay, the scammer buys the bottle from the merchant and pockets the difference.

Homage or Fromage?

There is a long history of artists copying paintings by past masters, both to learn and as homage. In Chinese art history, the ability of a contemporary artist to precisely replicate the work of an ancient master was considered worthy of the highest praise. Originality was not paramount, and no one complained if your painted vase looked identical to the work of a great vase painter from three centuries prior—in fact, that was a mark of skill, to be praised. China, therefore, has none of the hereditary tradition of concern over counterfeits that one finds in the West. Hence copying is barely restricted there.

But while fine art has a rich tradition of non-malevolent copying, in which a painting that is a copy can still be immensely pleasing and valuable, the only reason to “copy” wine is to deceive. The reuse of old bottles and a meticulously copied label imply a deliberate attempt at fraud.

Old wine in new bottles

It is relatively easy to forge or fake wine. All you need is a bottle, a label, and some wine, all of which can be readily and inexpensively obtained. “Bottle dealers” in Shanghai and Beijing collect empties from bars and restaurants and sell them on, with no questions asked. What the purchaser does with them is no concern of the dealer. Empty bottles of Lafite fetch up to $500. There is a global “wine lake”—more wine is made than is consumed, meaning that there is always an excess of production—so new wine to put inside old bottles is easily available.

Creating a forged label from scratch is tempting to fraudsters because labels and bottles for old wines vary so much. In the old days there was little, if any, consistency to labeling of Burgundy, for example. Bottling and labeling was done by hand. The paper, typeface, and design varied each year and the same wine might have different labels. It is endlessly complex and non-definitive.

Say, for example, you are one of China’s bao fa hu (“explosive rich”) and want to buy an expensive, old bottle of wine to present as a gift. If you have never seen or tasted a bottle of Lafite 1869 before and can’t read English (or French) then how would you know the difference between a genuine bottle and a fake or forgery? The opportunity is always there for fraudsters to exploit the lack of knowledge about old wines. 

How to spot a genuine fake

Major public galleries have armies of scientists, restorers, curators, and historians working in laboratories, studios, libraries, and archives. Raking light, ultraviolet light, x-radiography, infrared radiation, polarized light microscopy, scanning electron microscopes, energy dispersive x-rays, chromatography and x-ray fluorescence analysis are just some of the techniques available to picture historians.

Wine auctioneers have a nose.

The traditional, and still most reliable, way of judging if a wine is a fake or not is to taste it. But very few people have the experience and ability to declare that a bottle of, say, Pétrus 1921 is the real thing. Even then, old wines vary tremendously according to where and by whom they were bottled and where and how they have been stored.

Samples can be taken from a painting without causing significant damage to it. Wine, though, can only be sampled by opening the bottle, which, as it were, destroys the evidence and its value as a collector’s item. This is one of the great ironies of rare wine collecting—if the wine fulfils its purpose, and is consumed, then the collector’s item is no more. One has drunk the profits, so to speak, and must be content with having paid for an experience, not an object to be sold on or to be bequeathed.

Nonetheless, a good deal can be proved or disproved without pulling a cork. A wine auctioneer, like a museum researcher, will begin by studying archival evidence to establish provenance. A paper trail is crucial for old wines, which may have passed through many hands in their lifetime. Celebrity ownership reinforces provenance and can result in a premium, as with the Rockefeller Rothko paintings or the Glamis Castle clarets.

Provenance is relatively easy to forge, though. Receipts and certificates, for example, are simpler to make than the objects they “authenticate”. Forgeries and fakes tend to be successful only if they have convincing provenances, which may or may not be forgeries and fakes themselves.

Once provenance has been established the painting or wine itself can be examined closely. But fraudsters rely on the fact that, if the provenance looks good, then the object itself will not be subject to intense scrutiny. Master forgers like Shaun Greenhalgh and John Myatt did not produce perfect forgeries—Myatt even used acrylic paint when his forgeries called for oil. It was the success of their provenances that passed off their good-but-not-great forgeries as originals. A convincing provenance means that the object itself can be less than convincing and still pass as the real deal.

The confidence of the seller goes a long way, too. Rudy Kurniawan, revealed in 2012 to have been possibly the greatest wine fraudster of them all, offered a money-back guarantee for any buyers of his wines. Since few people had ever tasted the fabulous bottles that he offered for sale, his authority and integrity could not be challenged.

Weird science

Much wine history and opinion is anecdotal, lacking in empirical data. There is no formal scientific testing of old wine that can prove whether it is genuine or not. There is no vinous equivalent of Cranfield University’s “forensic science research” project with Bonhams, to authenticate works of art. An old bottle cannot be x-rayed like an old painting

However, The Times of May 31, 2009 reported that Russian scientists had devised a new and not very subtle way of authenticating paintings—the Bomb. They claimed that nuclear test explosions and the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 released elements into the atmosphere that can be detected in oil paintings made after the Second World War.

Prior to offering a 103-vintage collection of Château Lafite Rothschild, the Antique Wine Company of London (AWC) established what it now calls the “Caesium 137 Method”—chemical analysis of a microscopic sample of wine extracted via a hypodermic needle pierced through the cork. AWC also has the “PIXE method” to authenticate the age of a glass bottle, based on manganese and chromium levels.

These tests can show that a wine is definitely older than the atomic bomb explosions of the 1940s—but that certainly does not prove that it was made in 1787 or whenever. In the Rodenstock case, his supposedly 18th century Lafites did contain a portion of post-bomb wine, meaning that they had at the very least been topped up sometime in the past sixty years. This did not confirm, though, that the content of the bottles was wholly counterfeit.

Despite the vast sums generated by the top wine producers and merchants, there is no funding for research into fake wine. Individual wine estates do use various methods to counter forgers: Château Margaux, for example, has incorporated an anti-fraud seal on all of its bottles since March 2010. (Château Lafite Rothschild, probably the most faked wine of them all, has adopted this only since February 2012). The “Prooftag” seal runs between the capsule and the bottle, and has a reference number and a unique pattern, both of which can be tracked on Margaux’s website.

Some wine bottles have RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags inserted into the label or capsule. This is the same technology used in E-passports.

Industrial technology—that is, better closures—in combination with digital technology—barcodes and other things that can be scanned by a Smartphone, for example—might be able to reduce, if not prevent, wine fraud in the future.

But it is a constant battle. Any “solution” will typically last for six to 12 months before fraudsters have found a way round it. For example, non-refillable closures ostensibly prevent bottles from being refilled and resold—but they cannot counter the law of physics. If air and liquid can come out of a closure, then it can go in too. And there is always the paradox that if you educate consumers via advertising, then you educate fraudsters.

The Italian company Guala Closures Group has pioneered the ROPP (roll on pilfer proof) closure, a screwcap sporting a “Tamper Evident” band. This might help to prevent fraud but is not suitable for fine wines, which require a cork closure to enable long aging.

The American collector Russell H. Frye, one of the collectors involved in the Rodenstock affair, has established Wine Authentication Services, which bears the we-mean-business catchphrase “The war on counterfeiting starts here.” Frye lists 14 anti-counterfeiting technologies and methods, from Algoril (in which a random marking code is generated and then recorded in a database) to Sleever International’s Holosleeve® (“the first sleeve concept to combine mono-oriented heat shrink film technology with holographics to guarantee the authenticity of a product and its integrity”).

It is probably easier to send a manned mission to Mars than to find a foolproof and universally acceptable anti-counterfeiting method for fine wine. The search continues.

The Art of the Steal

Creating a fake or forgery is not a crime but stealing and/or selling one is. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to regulate the production of fake wine—a law is only broken when someone is defrauded by the fake.

Police investigate crimes from fakes and forgeries rather than the fakes themselves—that is the job of the “experts.” But many months and many countries may have been passed through between the creation of the fake and the criminal act of using it to defraud a potential victim.

Art is stolen more than wine because it is usually more valuable, and more easily transported, and has a broader appeal than the relatively small “club” of fine wine collectors. Even the most expensive wines are worth only a fraction of what the most valuable paintings fetch, with current record prices of well over $100 million. (The Royal Family of Qatar purchased Cézanne’s The Card Players privately in 2011 for more than $250 million, which is not far off the value all fine wine sold at auctions globally that year.)

The Mona Lisa is worth considerably more than a bottle of Lafite 1869. The prices for which even the most expensive wines sell are more akin to the price of fine art prints, rather than paintings and sculptures. This makes a certain amount of sense, as the rare wine market is relatively small, and even rare wines are almost never unique—like prints, they are rare but part of a series and therefore of less value individually than unique works of art.

Individual bottles are stolen all the time from shop shelves. Breaking into a professional wine storage facility, however, is more difficult. Some of them are underground and they are invariably heavily guarded. It takes longer to move cases of wine, which are heavy and fragile. Thieves rarely care if a work is damaged when they rip it off the wall—but they would be upset if a bottle of Lafite got broken.

There is no equivalent of the 1970 UNESCO Convention for wine, but the movement and sale of wine is already strictly controlled. Some people are tempted to try and circumnavigate shipping and taxation requirements, which constitutes financial fraud.

On the whole, stolen wines are less of a problem than fake wines because the legitimate market for the very best is so small. There is no wine equivalent to art thieves like Stephen Breitwieser or Adam Worth. But there might be equivalents to Eric Hebborn, perhaps the most skilful art forger in history.

 

（To be continued）