Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Fakes Busted in UK
There has been much made of the ongoing problem with counterfeit wines in the auction market. Bill Koch graced the cover of Wine Spectator magazine last year as a lone crusader out to bring this largely unregulated business to heel with a spate of lawsuits against the various auction houses and the consignors believed to be responsible for bringing some of these dubious bottles to market. Many bad bottles have been discovered, books have been written on the subject, but no one has ever found the smoking gun.
Until now. A UK raid has uncovered fake bottles of Jacob's Creek wine, a popular Australian wine that typically sells for around US$7 a bottle. Seven. Dollars. Okay...what does it cost to manufacture a bottle of cheap wine? You've got to be buying grapes somewhere, you need a wine making facility, a bottling line, warehousing, distribution. It's a whole business mimicking an existing business model.
Happily, the food safety regulator said the wine "is not harmful, but is of very low quality and substandard taste." It's interesting that even for a $7 bottle, you can be substandard--but what if it was the other way around? It's not hard to imagine that the same criminal masterminds that came up with this complex scheme could accidentally do better than the wine they're counterfeiting.
The Best Cellar urges all wine counterfeiters to aim higher.
