Wine Sediments

While most of us are happy to buy wine to cellar briefly or drink immediately, the serious collectors among us may want to exercise some extra caution when bidding these days, as counterfeit wine discoveries are on the rise. According to an Agence France-Presse article at Yahoo.com, recent Bordeaux frauds are a buyer and seller problem, not something that the wine producers need to concern themselves with:

“Yes, there are some fakes of very old bottles from the last century,” said Francis Mayeur, director of Chateau d’Yquem, a first growth Bordeaux wine that has been targeted by fakers.”But fakes do not concern the chateau, they concern exchanges between collectors,” he said, highlighting that the faking occurred after the wine had been sold by the chateaux.

Fakes are “not our problem”, said Christophe Salin, director of Chateau Lafite, another top-of-the-range first growth Bordeaux, who also said he had never seen a fake Lafite. However, he went on to add that once in Mexico, he had seen something so bad “it was funny”.

Another article that appeared at Forbes.com in June suggests that the problem extends far beyond first growth Bordeaux:

In recent years authorities in China have uncovered bottles of fake everything, from a $4,000 bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild to 12,000 bottles of $10 Mouton Cadet. Of particular interest of late have been Canadian icewines, which are relatively scarce and highly coveted in Asia.

What’s a high-end collector to do? Unfortunately, there isn’t much to do at this point. While some winemakers are beginning to experiment with solutions such as embedding microchips into the labels, using UV ink or holograms, or in the case of Australian producer BRL Hardy (makers of Penfolds Grange):

DNA from the company’s 125-year-old vines in south Australia is impregnated into light-reflective ink and applied to a tamperproof neck label that will seal the bottle.

The food and wine blog Philafoodie suggests that wine drinkers always compare the label and cork — which only works when you go to drink the wine, but won’t protect the buyer at the time of the sale. The other suggestion offered there is to become informed about the types of wines most likely to be fraudulent. For new world fanatics, the news is (relatively) good — high end Napa cabs are rarely faked (yet.)

I find it disappointing that some Bordeaux producers — those whose wines are targeted the most frequently — do not see wine counterfeiting as “their problem.” In my mind, that kind of apathy would be akin to supermarkets and growers declaring that recent traces of e coli found in spinach supplies was “not their problem.” Buyer beware, I suppose.