Wine fraud
Wine fraud has probably existed since the earliest trading and commerce in wine, but it appears to increase when there is widespread prosperity and the prices of some wines become very high. However, wine fraud can involve less expensive wines if they are sold in large volumes.
One form of fraud involves affixing counterfeit labels of expensive wines to bottles of less expensive wine. For example, counterfeit bottles of world famous 1982
Chateau Lafite-Rothschild were widely sold in China in 2002. In Hong Kong, authorities discovered a fraudulent 1982
Chateau Petrus for sale at $ 4,000.00.
In 1995, police in Hong Kong discovered over 12,000 bottles of supposed Mouton Cadet in a supermarket. Although Mouton Cadet is not an expensive wine, thousands of people could be defrauded and the perpetrators could make substantial illegal profits. That fraud is minor in comparison to that discovered in 2000, when Italian authorities uncovered one million bottles of fake Chianti.
Reporter Pierre-Marie Doutrelant "disclosed that many famous Champagne houses, when short on stock, bought bottled but unlabeled wine from cooperatives or one of the big private-label producers in the region, then sold it as their own" (Prial).
Probably much more common is the practice of blending inexpensive wine with more expensive wine and selling it at the higher price. A highly regarded wine shipping company, Henri Cruse, was caught blending cheap Rioja wine into Bordeaux.
In 1988, a whistle blower in
Chateau Giscours, classified as one of the 65 best vineyards of Bordeaux, revealed that the chateau illegally blended lesser vintages of the property into more valuable ones which, were sold at the higher price, in addition to other crimes of fraud and deception.
Many
Burgundy wine shippers have been found guilty of blending inexpensive wine with red Burgundies and exporting them at exorbitant prices. One particularly blatant Burgundy shipper, Bernard Grivelet, bottled inferior wine from elsewhere in France and sold it in magnum and double magnum bottles as Burgundy in 2001.
In 2002,
Jacques Hemmer, a Bordeaux shipper, was caught blending cheap wines from southern France into much more expensive Bordeaux. He was convicted of his crime and paid a fine.
Some consumers would be fortunate to only have been cheated out of their money. Twenty-three consumers died in 1986 because a fraudulent winemaker in Italy blended toxic methanol (wood alcohol) into his low-alcohol wine to increase its alcohol content.
In 1985, diethylene glycol (an anti-freeze) appeared to have been added as an adulterant by some Austrian producers of white wines to make them sweeter and upgrade the dry wines to sweet wines; production of sweet wines is expensive and addition of sugar is easy to detect. Fortunately, the amount added was not high enough to be toxic except at impossibly high levels of consumption (one would have had to have ingested about 28 bottles per day for two weeks). The
Simpsons episode
The Crepes of Wrath refers to this type of wine fraud, when Bart discovers that the cruel vintners with whom he is lodging are adding anti-freeze to their wine.
Reporter Doutrelant reported the comments of "a government inspector on the illegal use of sugar to boost the alcoholic content of Beaujolais-Villages:'If the law had been enforced in 1973 and 1974, at least a thousand producers would have put out of business'" (Prial).
The same writer explained how growers "planted mouvedre and syrah, two low-yield grapes that give the wine finesse, strictly for the benefit of the government inspectors. Then, when the inspectors left, they grafted cheap, high-yield vines back onto the vines" (Prial).
All of these forms of fraud victimize innocent and unsuspecting consumers.
A number of books address wine fraud. They include
* Barr, Andrew.
Wine Snobbery. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
*Fielden, Christopher.
"Is this the Wine You Ordered, Sir?": The Dark Side of the Wine Trade. London: Helm, 1990.
*Hallgarten, Fritz.
Wine Scandal. NY: Time Warner, 1988.
*
Château Pontet-Canet*
Georges Duboeuf*Berger, Dan. Why wine scandals rarely hit U.S.
Napa Valley Register, August 10, 2004.
*Prial Frank. A Reporters' Reporter. In: Frank Prial.
Decantations. NY: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001. Pp. 23-25.
*Wikipedia. diethylene glycol
