I think this is an accurate analysis of the situation.
I honestly believe that if these wines were served blind, they would have all gotten scores in the 80s. If these wines were served with labels showing but no mention of their alleged falsification, the lowest score would have been 93. But they were served after notification that they were probably fake, so the scores dip into the 60s. Parker was absolutely used by the person who sponsored this event. He wanted to prove that he could identify fake wines, so he wanted to manipulate the situation to get Parker to agree that these were fake wines. And he did.
I actually do something very similar when I serve wines to my non-wino friends. If I open a wine they haven’t heard of before (chilean, spanish, etc), I’ll usually tell them that it got great reviews by wine critics and was compared very favorably to wines that they love (assuming that it’s true, of course). Yes, it would probably be more honest to let them taste it blind and come to their own opinion, but I want them to enjoy themselves at my house and my little introduction to the wines makes that much more likely.
I’ve always wanted to know how the counterfeiters do this so that:
The counterfeit wine is “just good enough” to fool the pros, but
The counterfeit wine is not so good that procuring it cuts too far into the profit margin.
If you were trying to fake a 1961 Latour, what would you use - a 1968 Cali Cab? Or a 1970 Second Growth?
So that you’d be investing $500 in wine upfront so as to fake a $5000 bottle?
And if you were trying to fake a 1962 DRC, what would you use - a 1978 LeRoy?
So that you’d be investing maybe $3000 to $5000 upfront so as to fake a $20,000 or $30,000 bottle?
It seems to me that the fakery would require a pretty big initial investment - both in wine which was “good enough”, and in labels and glues and tinfoils and corks which had that “aged” look.
And how do you fake an “old” cork so that it still has the correct winery and vintage stamped on it?
Anyway, say you invested $5,000 X 12 = $60,000 to fake a case of DRC at $25,000 X 12 = $300,000.
You’ve still got to hire your forger [or forgers] to produce your fake labels, your fake corks, and your fake tinfoil [and somehow to make the glue under the label look “old” - whatever “old” glue looks like].
And you really ought to transfer your wine [from the real bottle to the fake bottle] within a nitrogen-filled chamber - so as to minimize the resulting oxidation - which means that you need need some kind of a lab with at least an air-tight fume chamber [plus an account with a liquid nitrogen distributor].
It just seems like a heckuva lotta work for not much payoff.
Have you read The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Nathan? It never really answers the question of how Rodenstock cooked these things up, but ends with a description of the intriguing paraphenalia found in the basement of the house where he lived, including wine labels with no printing, old corks and a carpet covered with dirt that it was suspected he used to “age” bottles. It also describes how he never let anyone take any of the bottles at his grand tastings; his assistant snatched them up before anyone could take a souvenir. I believe it also reported that he sometimes sought out very old bottles that appeared to be in terrible condition – probably for the bottles alone.
As for what’s in the bottle, the striking thing about the Rodenstock tastings was how consistent and fresh the wines were reported to be. (And there was never a bad bottle!) One can only guess that he took decent wine of the same type, probably with some age, and added some substantially older wine to give it more secondary notes so that it could plausibly pass as very old.
When you read about the astonishing number of bottles he put into the stream of commerce, it’s not so hard to see how this made sense for him. By most accounts now, it’s done on a commercial scale – not a bottle here, a bottle there – so that the production costs aren’t prohibitive. I’m sure you can make money faking Lafite or Ponsot or Gaja even if they aren’t labelled as ancient.
Okay, suppose you wanted to fake a recent 100-pt Lafite, like the 1996, the 2000, or the 2003.
What do you use for the fake juice?
It’s got to be something which has the signature Lafite “graphite/lead pencil” nose.
Do you maybe just take a not-quite-so-spectacular vintage of Lafite, maybe a 1999/2001/2002, so as to get the basic aromas, and then you adulterate it with something like Shafer Hillside Select? Or maybe Tenuta Sette Ponti Oreno?
What you’re serving up has to be really, really good, so could you pull off a fake $1500 bottle of 2000 Lafite using maybe only about $250 worth of 2002 Lafite and 2002 Shafer Hillside Select?
Or can you fool people for much less money than that?
Heck, at some point in the price escalation wars, it seems as though Lafite’s immediate neighbors might be tempted to send 100% of their production to Hong Kong for use as “graphite/lead pencil” flavoring in the counterfeit trade.
You use the 2000 Carruades and cook it down a little in the sauce pan to concentrate it, then fill it out with a dash of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Voila. 100 points, “rich, hedonistic, almost flirtatious Bordeaux”.
Mike’s post was terrific. I was taken aback (but I suppose not surprised) by the remarkable hubris-tone by Bob’s post. Such chest thumping about how he can detect fake wine (when lots of evidence points to the contrary).
As I posted on Mike’s blog, the logic is so weird as to be bizarre.
All wines are proclaimed fake.
I give all of them low scores and call most of them undrinkable.
Rodenstock’s supposedly 19th century wines did test positive for radioactivity, which showed that they had some post-Hiroshima wine in them. Beyond that, who knows. I think Dave’s recipe may not be far off. And I don’t think lead pencil (which is really cedar) is that hard to come buy. It’s pretty standard in Pauillac.
Personally, I have wanted to concoct a current release 100-point Parker wine. It will include Dr. Pepper and vodka (or grain alcohol), but I’m still trying to come up with the base wine. Suggestions?
Reading Steinberger’s post again, he seems uncharacteristically circumspect, particularly given Parker’s ducking of the big issues about his past ratings of Rodenstock wines and the dubious, non-blind format of this tasting. Bravo to Steinberger for keeping on the case, I say!
I like Mike’s writing, I think what he does is a pretty far cry from how Neal paints it, and I think he comes off in a pleasantly mellow fashion compared to many in this field.
Mark Kaplan’s analysis seems quite good here.
As for faking the wines: It seems that until recently, off vintages of even top wines were not that expensive. Probably even less so if one wasn’t that particular as to provenance or condition. From there, doing exactly the sort of adulteration hinted at above is probably the logical answer. Not to mention possible manipulations involving the addition ofnon-wine elements. It does seem that in the increasing comodification of top bordeaux and a few burgs, even off-vintages of these wines will be rather expensive for such purposes. But still, when you see what good examples of these wines go for in, for instance, the Asian auction market, it is easy to see how a case of 1983 Lafite (current Sotheby’s 795/btl) could be an acceptable cost, especially if you could somehow yield 1+ cases of fake '82 (current Sotheby’s at 3445/btl).
I think at times Steinberger focuses too much on Parker. Frankly he is a great writer and a smart guy and has better things to write about. (His book on the decline of French cuisine is a strong read.)
I do not agree that this is one of those times (where he is over-focusing), and I agree that he is pretty toned down.
I am of course the pot calling the kettle black on this topic. I would do well to forget about Parker’s existence, but I get so frustrated watching him fumble in the online world.
I read the Parker article and didn’t come away with this impression at all. It was an interesting article on how external characteristics can be highly suspicious, and how the wine in the bottle was much worse than what Rodenstock served in '95, fake or not.
I think you are setting up a straw man argument here Wilfred, but that’s just my personal read. As to Steinberger, he seems to have as much of a hard-on about dissecting Parker’s every word and move as some of the anti-Parker crowd here. It’s like listening to Republicans and Democrats in full-on campaign mode.
t’s like listening to Republicans and Democrats in full-on campaign mode.[/quote]
That’s a great analogy, but who are the Democrats and who are the Republicans. Given the stereotypes, I’d say the Parkerites are the Dems and the Meadowsians are the Reps (the stereotype being that wine drinkers start with Bordeaux and move to Burgundy as they get older, as Democrats often become Republicans later in life. Also, the Meadowsians are more concerned with traditional styles disappearing.)
I don’t get it. Mike didn’t announce the story, Bob did. He announced that he’d be reporting on some fraud wines. When he did, it turned out that he was invited to taste bogus wines, the person who invited him explained why the wines were fake, and Bob then tasted the wines, actually scoring them.
Was it a newsworthy event?
I was curious as to what Bob actually contributed. Mike explained it. That wasn’t Bob’s purpose. He was just invited to take part in the tasting.
I’m not piling on Bob either. That’s totally OK and I have respect for him.
I don’t believe that he’s able to distinguish most of those wines if given them blind, but that’s not how the tasting was done. He says he’s tasted them before, in some cases several times. That’s good and may provide some reference, but he wasn’t there to DETECT fraudulent wine, he was there to TASTE fraudulent wine. Big dif.
That being the case, it’s not a particularly newsworthy event, it’s more of an aside. Seems like the only guys who are any good at detecting fraud are the guys who use objective criteria, rather than personal feelings. The wine “experts” aren’t forensic experts. No surprise there.
What is a surprise is the fact that the “experts” are so bad at detecting frauds. And in this case, I’m not talking about Parker at all. I’m talking about the MWs at the auction houses. People in the antique business have well-known ways of faking antique furniture. What I learned from this article, and what I didn’t actually realize although I should have, is that the same techniques can be used for faking “antique” wine.
![[thumbs-up.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f84c5acc11486ee4baba6dee6cf61dbd133abb18.gif "[thumbs-up.gif]"){kind=small}
![[welldone.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/fc9709a841aa9379fd892a9cf0b535b05f473b86.gif "[welldone.gif]"){kind=small}
