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The killer clue turned out to be on the bottle, not in it. Knockoff outfits in China are selling cases of counterfeit product supposedly from high-end California wineries, and legions of smaller con artists are flooding the auction circuit with fakes. High-profile con men aren’t the only wine fraudsters in on the game. To protect their investment and calm jittery buyers, some wineries are investing in technology that authenticates their bottles. Koch sued Rodenstock, but the German citizen claimed immunity from U.S.
Koch and fellow billionaire Christopher Forbes bought several of the hand-blown, wax-capped Jefferson Bottles at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. They became the crown jewels of Koch’s collection, and he solicited historians from Monticello – Jefferson’s estate in Virginia – to fill in the backstory of the wine’s provenance. To solve the mystery, Koch employed an ex-FBI agent named Jim Elroy to scour the globe for clues. What did he discover? To Koch’s severe displeasure, the Jefferson experts reported the bottles were likely counterfeit, since they never appeared in Jefferson’s meticulous records.
It’s hard to feel sorry for Bill Koch. The phony bottles of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild from 1961 and handblown relics reportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson were forged by enterprising wine dealers-turned-fraudsters who “aged” fake labels with coffee grounds, tampered with corks and passed off grocery-store hooch for the finest of fine wines. His less-than-modest Florida home features original works of art by Picasso and Monet and a wine cellar containing some of the most expensive and scarce vintages in the world. You could argue that wine fraud is a victimless crime, since the people who “suffer” still have billions to spare. That’s how Koch described the dubious contents of 421 bottles of counterfeit wine that he unwittingly purchased for $4.5 million over the past 25 years.
Kurniawan’s defense lawyers used that very argument in a vain attempt to reduce the forger’s sentence. To fake an expensive wine, you have two options: tamper with the bottle or mess with the wine inside. Who cares if a handful of one-percenters get ripped off trying to impress their friends? For the first method, you can buy bottles of perfectly good wine and plaster on the label of a much better one. Those costs are built into your next bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Wine drinkers, for one. Keep reading to hear how private investigators solved the mystery of the infamous “Jefferson Bottles” and learn about the high-tech precautions wineries are taking to protect their priceless beverages from enterprising con artists.
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