In 2012 the esoteric world of wine connoisseurship made the news when the FBI raided the Californian home of an Indonesian national called Rudy Kurniawan. They found a factory for creating fake wines with bottles, corks, labels and even recipes. According to Rebecca Gibb in Vintage Crime, Kurniawan’s counterfeit Mouton Rothschild from the legendary 1945 vintage consisted of two parts Cos d’Estournel, one part Château Palmer and one part California cabernet. Now tell me that doesn’t sound delicious.
Most people don’t care about provenance as long as the wine tastes good and isn’t actually poisonous
The book takes the reader on a highly entertaining tour of wine fraud from ancient times up to the present day. Gibb is a Master of Wine but wears her erudition lightly. Perhaps a little too lightly at times, leading to sentences such as: ‘Socialism and trade unionism gained more followers in the last third of the 19th century than a Hollywood A-list celebrity on social media.’
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