Cheap plonk or fine vintage? Even the wine critics can't tell!

• Gibb takes readers on an entertaining gallop through wine fraud down the ages
• READ MORE: Drink pink! France develops a taste for rosé wine as a year-round favourite as sales of red wine plummet

FOOD & DRINK

Vintage Crime 

by Rebecca Gibb  (University of California Press £25, 282pp)

For the assembled wine writers, it was a lunch to remember. It began at midday and by the time it ended, well after midnight, they had eaten their way through a dozen courses and enthusiastically consumed no fewer than 66 different wines.

During the meal, at the famous Chateau d’Yquem winery, guests surreptitiously washed down aspirin with their vintage champagne to try to ward off the next day’s hangover.

This lunch, and its fabulous wines, had been organised by Hardy Rodenstock, a former band manager who had become a celebrated collector and dealer of wine. 

From the late 1970s onwards, Rodenstock had shown an uncanny knack for tracking down rare and expensive wines.

What none of his guests could have known was that, within a few years, Rodenstock would be unmasked as a fraudster who regularly adulterated his wine and switched the labels on bottles — including, in all likelihood, the dozens of vintages that the wine critics had drunk so appreciatively.

If even wine experts can’t tell the genuine article from a fake, what’s to stop fraudsters exploiting wine snobbery? 

As Rebecca Gibb — herself a Master Of Wine — says in this entertaining gallop through wine fraud down the ages, the authenticity of wines is something of a grey area which relies heavily on expert opinion, something which has proved again and again to be all too fallible.

Dodgy dealings in wine have been going on ever since people first started drinking fermented grape juice.

The Romans liked their wine heavily flavoured, adding a generous splash of seawater to it along with herbs, spices and floral essences, regarding this as an improvement rather than adulteration. 

In the way of British tourists taking their own tea bags with them on holiday, Romans who were travelling would often carry a packet of their favourite blend of herbs to add to any wine they drank along the way.

Although many countries passed laws against food adulteration and counterfeiting in the 19th century, wine fraud has continued to be widespread.

The simplest of swindles is to pass off cheap plonk as fine wine.

A high-profile trial in 1974 laid bare the underhand tactics of wine- makers in the prestigious Bordeaux region. 

Rough red wine was being sent to the United States, brazenly marked ‘sell as Beaujolais in the U.S.’, while Germans were being fobbed off with ordinary vin blanc, sold under the name of a famous Bordeaux appellation.

All sorts of dirty tricks were employed: treating foul-smelling wines with activated charcoal to remove the unpleasant aroma, adding powdered acid to make wines seem fresher, or softening tart wines with calcium carbonate, often used as an abrasive in toothpaste.

Not surprisingly, Bordeaux sales plummeted after these revelations.

But at least the Bordeaux growers weren’t actually poisoning their customers. In 1985, it emerged that cheap and cheerful Austrian wines were being laced with diethylene glycol, a sweet-tasting, viscous liquid that miraculously gives sour wine a full, rich-bodied flavour, but can also cause kidney failure.

The diethylene glycol was confused in the public mind with ethylene glycol, or antifreeze, leading one waggish English garage to boast: ‘None of our antifreeze has been contaminated with foreign wine.’

The Italian wine industry had its own scandal at around the same time, when it was found that some wine companies had been adding methanol, a wood-based alcohol, to boost the alcohol content of their product. 

They overdid the methanol and 25 people died from drinking adulterated red wine. This scandal led to Italian wines being temporarily banned in France, Germany and Switzerland.

One of the most unlikely wine fraudsters was Rudy Kurniawan, a geeky young Indonesian who Gibb describes as ‘the Great Gatsby of the wine world’.

Kurniawan charmed his way into a group of wealthy American wine collectors, wowing them with his ability to acquire the finest and rarest wines for them.

Gradually, some of his customers began to question the provenance and quality of his wines. When the police raided his home they found boxes of unlabelled wines, bags of corks, drawers full of fine wine labels and rubber stamps with the names of famous wine estates and rare vintages.

In 2013, he was given a ten-year sentence — the first person in the U.S. to be jailed for selling counterfeit wines — and had to pay millions of dollars back to his victims.

Are things any better now? Advances in technology mean it should be getting easier to spot fakes.

A modern wine can no longer be passed off as a very old one due to the ability to test a bottle (without opening it) for radioactive isotopes, which weren’t in the atmosphere before nuclear testing began in 1952.

Some high-end wineries now place a chip on the bottle which shows whether a cork has been removed or tampered with, while others put a unique reference number on their bottles so their origin can be traced.

Despite this, wine fraud is still booming, with China the main culprit. It’s been estimated that 50 per cent of the high-end Chateau Lafite sold in China is fake.

Thirty billion bottles of wine are uncorked every year and no one knows how many of them are adulterated or downright fakes.

Even experts often struggle to accurately identify the origin and quality of a wine during blind tastings, and if you think you’re drinking Champagne when it’s actually Cava, does it matter?

‘Wine remains ripe for counterfeiting,’ Gibb concedes.

Given this, perhaps the best advice is simply to drink what you enjoy and not to worry about the label on the bottle.