What did he Discover?
Kurniawan’s exploits as a wine fraud were brilliantly chronicled in a 2012 Vanity Fair profile by Michael Steinberger. From that article, we learn that Kurniawan came to America from Indonesia as a teenager and fell in love with wine with his first sip of the high-end California wine Opus One. Bankrolled by what he said was family wealth, Kurniawan launched an expensive wine habit in his 20s, buying millions of dollars of rare bottles at auction and splurging for elaborate parties with bar tabs in excess of $250,000.
Jim Elroy learned about a nuclear physicist in France who might hold the key to unlocking the true age of the wine inside the Jefferson Bottles. The physicist, Philippe Hubert, is an expert in dating objects by detecting levels of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope of the element that didn’t exist before the explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. If the Jefferson Bottles are as old as Rodenstock claimed they were, the grapes used to make the wine should not contain any cesium-137. For Koch, though, cesium-137 wasn’t the smoking gun. The test showed no radioactive elements, meaning the wine was produced before 1945. But 160 years before 1945?
The second most famous wine cheat is still at large. The address, conveniently, remains a secret. Like Kurniawan, Rodenstock cultivated a colorful reputation as a globetrotting millionaire with exceptional taste. German collector Hardy Rodenstock, born Meinhard Goerke, was the con-man genius behind the “Jefferson Bottles,” 1780s vintages of Chateau Lafite bearing the scrawled initials of famous Francophile Thomas Jefferson. His greatest talent, though, was finding previously undiscovered cellars containing some of the world’s rarest vintages.
The bubble pattern, along with a scannable QR code, tracks the bottle back to the winery. But all of this new technology isn’t much use to collectors like Koch, who crave bottles from the pre-digital age. There’s also a chip on the back label that can be scanned with a smartphone to give information on the wine as well as its precise location. Another company, Applied DNA Sciences, can embed invisible, encrypted DNA tags into the wine’s label. Further, the California label Opus One has invested in a tamper-proof capsule that changes color once the bottle has been opened.
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