LABEL EXPERT WITNESS ARCHIVE
LABEL EXPERT WITNESS TRIAL

“Can we put the cork back in the bottle,” he jokes at one point. These scraps let us see Kurniawan as he must have appeared to the world he conned: boyish, charming, evasive. A film crew had followed Kurniawan for a few days early on, for a pilot of a food and wine show that was never made.

LABEL EXPERT WITNESS ARCHIVE

The tale is told through a mixture of interviews and archive footage. It’s like the opposite of an Agatha Christie story, where there is one detective and multiple suspects. “Pretty quickly we worked out that we could work together, and given the nature of the story it was helpful to have someone in Europe and someone in America. “We were always at the back of the line for interviews in court, so we ended up talking to each other a lot,” says Rothwell. The FBI found a fully equipped counterfeiting workshop at Kurniawan’s house Having read about the arrest in New York Magazine, and not being a wine buff himself, Atlas thought Kurniawan sounded like a Robin Hood figure, taking only from those who could afford to pay.

Reuben Atlas, an American, was coming from the opposite view. Jerry Rothwell, an Englishman who had been working on a film about the founders of Greenpeace, was following Laurent Ponsot on the trail of his faked wine. It came about after two directors met by chance at Kurniawan’s trial. In 2014 he was sentenced to 10 years in a California prison, the first person to be convicted of wine fraud.Ī new documentary, Sour Grapes, revisits the story. The feeling of being scammed will be familiar to almost anyone who has ordered wine in a restaurant: Kurniawan simply scaled it up. A Princeton economist came up with an algorithm based on weather data from the grape crop’s growth period that nearly exactly mimicked Parker’s scores.Ĭaught red-handed: bottles being prepared att Kurniawan’s California home Photograph: pr The entire industry hangs on the word of the critic Robert Parker, whose scores are a benchmark against how wines are priced. What’s more, several scientific studies have shown that even professed experts are hardly better than chance at identifying different wines. It is poor guestmanship to lob aspersions on any proffered bottle, let alone one that cost as much as your car. On the occasions they are opened, it is usually courtesy of a generous host.

The most expensive wines are so rarely drunk few can claim to be expert on how they taste. Kurniawan had been taking cheaper wines – though still better than you will find in your average off-licence – and putting them in more expensive bottles, or altering bottles to appear more valuable. They found a fully equipped counterfeiting workshop, complete with corking tools, labels, empty bottles and extensive tasting notes. In March 2012 they raided Kurniawan’s house in Arcadia, California. Authentication experts saw more and more dodgy consignments emerging from these record-breaking auctions. He set out to investigate.Īround the same time Bill Koch, an American billionaire who found fake bottles in his collection, hired private detectives and filed a lawsuit. Laurent Ponsot, the head of the house, found this surprising as his family only started making the wine in 1982. Bottles of Clos St Denis from Domaine Ponsot, of vintages between 19, started to turn up. In time, however, discrepancies appeared in the market.

LABEL EXPERT WITNESS TRIAL

Corked: foil capsules, labels and corks that were used as evidence in the trial of Rudy Kurniawan.

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